Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  Even a year later, when she would have to abandon a life of splendid leisure in the Palace of Seclusion and run in terror of death through the dark streets of Great Xis, every moment of this day would still be alive inside her a day that had begun like many others, with her friend Duny poking her out of bed in the darkness before sunrise.

  Duny had been so aflutter with excitement that morning she could barely keep her voice in a proper whisper. “Oh, get up, Qin-ya, get up! It’s today! He’s coming! To the Hive!”

  The events of that day would lift Qinnitan up to heavenly heights, to honors not just undreamed-of, but so impossible as to be ludicrous even to imagine Still, if she had known all of what was to come, she would have done anything to escape, as a jackal in a trap will gnaw through its own leg in its desperation for freedom.

  They hurried down the corridor, two lines of girls with hair still damp from the water they had splashed on their faces and heads in the ritual cleansing, their robes sticking to their bodies, making a lively chill that would not last long in the rising heat of the day Qmnitan’s own black hair hung in lank, loose ringlets, the odd reddish streak hardly visible when it was wet. When she was a baby, the old women of Cat’s Eye Street had called it a witch streak and made the pass-evil sign, but no sign of witchery or anything out of the ordinary at all had followed. Some of the other children had called her “Striped Cat,” but other than that, by the time she was old enough to range the streets and alleys in the neighborhood of her parents’ house, no one paid any more attention to it than they did to a mole on the nose or crossed eyes.

  “But why is He coming here?” Qinnitan asked, still not quite awake.

  “To find out what the bees think,” Duny said.

  “Of course.”

  “Think about what?” The priestesses and the Hive Mistress often spoke about autarchs coming to seek the wisdom of the sacred bees, tiny oracles of the all-powerful fire god Nushash, but the names they cited were of the impossibly distant past—Xarpedon, Lepthis, rulers whom Qinnitan had only ever heard mentioned during the boasting of the Great Hive’s caretakers. But now the real, living autarch, the god-on-earth himself, was coming to consult with the fire god’s bees. It was hard to believe. Her father had been a priest in the temple of Nushash all his life but had never been favored with a visit from an actual autarch. Qinnitan had been a sworn acolyte priestess for scarcely more than a year. It almost didn’t seem fair.

  This autarch, Sulepis, was a fairly young god-on-earth still. He had only been on the Falcon Throne for a short time—Qinnitan could remember his father, the old autarch Parnad, dying (followed more violently by several of his other sons, who had been the current autarch’s rivals) when she had first gone to serve the bees, the funereal hush that had lain so deeply on the Hive temple that she had been surprised later to discover things were not always that way. Perhaps the autarch’s youthtulness explained why he was doing astounding things like visiting a smoke-filled apiary in one of the more obscure corners of Nushash’s sprawling, ancient fire temple.

  “Do you think He’ll be handsome?” Duny asked in a strangled whisper, clearly shocked and thrilled by her own daring Sulepis had spent most of his first months on the throne chastising some of the outer provinces who had thought, falsely and to their subsequent regret, that the new, young autarch might prove timid. Thus, he had not found time for the sort of processions or public events that made the common people feel as though they knew their ruler Qinnitan could only shrug and shake her head. She couldn’t think of the autarch in that way and it hurt her head even to try. It was like a worm trying to decide whether a mountain was the right color. She wasn’t angry, though she knew her friend was frightened, and who wouldn’t be? They were going to meet the living god, a being as far above them as the stars, someone who could snuff all their lives more easily than Qinnitan could kill a fly.

  For a brief moment—it was always too brief-—the acolytes passed out of the narrow passageway into the high-windowed gallery that crossed from the living quarters to the temple complex Twelve to fifteen steps at most, depending on how quickly the leading girl was marching, but it was the only chance Qinnitan had to see below her the magnificent city of Great Xis, a city in which she had once, if not exactly run free, at least lived at street level, among people that spoke in normal tones of voice In the Hive scarcely anyone ever spoke above a whisper—although sometimes the whispers could be as intrusive as shouts.

  “Do you think He’ll speak? What do you think He’ll sound like?”

  “Quiet, Duny!”

  Qinnitan had just a few moments each day to savor the world outside the temple, even if she only saw it at a distance, and she missed it very much. As always, she opened her eyes wide as they crossed the windowed gallery, trying to drink in every bit she could absorb, the blue sky bleached mostly gray with the smoke of a million fires, the pearl-white rooftops stretching far beyond sight like an endless beach covered with squared stones, interrupted here and there where the towers of the greatest families thrust up into the air. The towers’ colorful stripes and gold ornaments made them look like the sleeves of splendid garments, as though each tower were a man’s fist raised toward the heavens. But of course the rich men of the tower families had no complaints against the heavens instead of clenched in a fist, their tower-hands should be spread wide, in case the gods should decide to throw down even more good fortune on people already choked with it.

  Qinnitan often wondered what would have happened if her own family had been one of the ruling elite instead of only a middling merchant family, her father a landholder instead of a mere functionary in the administration of one of Nushash’s larger temples. She supposed it could have been worse—he could have been a lackey of one of the other gods, fast losing power to the great fire god. “We are so lucky to have this for you,” her parents had told her when she had been admitted as an acolyte of the Sisters of the Hive, although she herself had prayed—blasphemy, but there it was—that it would not happen. “Far richer families than ours would shed blood for such an honor. You will be serving in the autarch’s own temple!”

  The temple, of course, had proved to be a sprawl of connected buildings that seemed only slightly smaller than Great Xis itself, and Qinnitan one of so many hundreds of Hive Sister acolytes that it was doubtful even the priestess in charge of her living quarters knew more than a few of their names.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do if He looks at me. If I faint, will He have me put to death?”

  “Please, Duny. No, I’m sure people faint all the time. He’s a god, after all.”

  “You say that so strangely, Qin. Are you feeling ill?”

  Her momentary glimpse of freedom ended: the mighty city disappeared as they stepped out of the gallery and into the next corridor. One of Qinnitan’s aunts had told her that Xis was so big that a bird could live its entire life while flying from one side of the city to the other, perching along the way to sleep, eat, and perhaps even start a family. Qinnitan was not certain that was true—her father had poured scorn on the notion—but it was certainly true that there was a world outside so much bigger than her own constrained circumstances, so much more vast than her march from living quarters to temple each morning and back again each evening, that she ached to be a bird, flaunting herself above a city that never ended.

  Even fretful, chattering Duny at last fell silent as they passed into the great hypostyle hall, awed as they all were, every day, by the size of the stone pillars shaped like cedars that stretched up a dozen times the girls’ height or more before disappearing into the inky shadows beneath the ceiling. When she had first come to the temple, Qinnitan had thought it strange that Nushash should live in such a dark place, but after a while she had come to see how right it was. Fire was never brighter than when it bloomed out of blackness, never more important than when it was the only light in a sunless place.

  At the end of the great hall the eyes of Nushash were opening even now as the temple’s o
ldest priest lit the great lanterns, moving more slowly than it seemed any human being could manage and yet still be alive, extending his long lighting-pole with the creeping pace of an insect that thinks it might be observed by a hungry bird. This priest was one of the only men Qinnitan and her fellow acolytes saw during the conduct of their daily duties. Despite the fact that he was Favored, and thus a reason far more compelling than mere age ensured he was no threat to a large congregation of virgins, Qinnitan thought the Hive Sisters must have picked him because he was old enough to be doubly safe. They certainly had not picked him for his skill and dispatch. He must have already been at his maddeningly slow work for hours this morning, she decided more than half the lanterns had been kindled. Their flicker exposed the looping lines of the sacred writing on the wall behind them, the gold characters of the Hymn to the Fire God glinting red with reflected flame.

  It is from You, O Great One, that all things good arise,

  Mighty Nushash,

  O bright-eyed, the foundation of heaven’s hearth.

  We ourselves arise from You and, like smoke, we live in the air for a short time.

  only, proceeding from Your warmth,

  But we survive forever in the depth of the flame which isYour immortal heart . . .

  Beyond the massive and ornately decorated archway lay the maze and inner sanctuary of Nushash himself, chief god of the world, the lord of fire whose wagon was the sun—a wagon bigger even than the autarch’s earthly palace, Qinnitan’s father had bragged, its wheels higher than the tallest tower. (Her father Cheshret was nothing if not proud of his employer.) Mighty Nushash crossed the sky each day in this great cart and then, despite all the snares that Argal the Dark One laid for him, despite the monsters that thronged his path, continued on through the night beyond the dark mountains, so he could bring the light of fire back to the sky each morning, thus allowing the earth and all who dwelled in it to live.

  Somewhere beyond that archway glowered the great golden statue of Nushash himself, as well as all the endless corridors and chambers of his great temple, the chapels and the priests’ living quarters and the storage rooms so filled with offerings that a vast part of his army of priests had no other task except to receive and catalog them. Beyond that archway lay the seat of the fire god’s power on earth, and it formed—along with the autarch’s palace—the axis of the entire spinning world. But of course, girls like Qinnitan were not allowed into that part of the temple, nor were any other women, not even the autarch’s paramount wife or his venerated mother.

  The procession of acolyte priestesses turned left down the smaller hallway, hurrying on softly pattering feet toward the Temple of the Hive of the Fire God’s Sacred Bees, to give it its full name. If the youngest Hive Sisters had not been waiting weeks for this day, it was at this moment that they would have first realized today was not to be like the others the high priestess herself was waiting for them, along with her chief acolyte. Although she was not as venerated as the Oracle Mudry, High Priestess Rugan was the mistress of the Hive temple and thus one of the most powerful women in Xis. That being the case, she was a remarkably ordinary and even kindly woman, although she did not suffer foolish behavior well.

  High Priestess Rugan clapped her hands and the girls all fell silent, gathered in a semicircle around her. “You all know what day this is,” she said in her deep voice, “and who is coming.” She touched her own ceremonial robe and hood, as if to be sure she had remembered to put them on. “I do not need to tell you the temple must be spotless.”

  Qinnitan suppressed a groan. They had been cleaning all week—how could it get any cleaner?

  Rugan s face was appropriately stern. “You will give thanks as you work. You will praise Nushash and our great autarch for this honor. You will consider the monumental importance to all our lives of this visit. And most importantly, as you work, you will reflect on the sacred bees and their own ceaseless, uncomplaining toil.”

  “They are so beautiful,” said the chief acolyte.

  Qinnitan paused for a moment in her work to look at the great hives behind their clouds of smoky silk netting, vast cylinders of fired clay decorated with bands of copper and gold and warmed in winter by pots of boiling water set beneath the bulky ceremonial stands—one of the least enjoyable of the acolytes’jobs Qinnitan had more than a few burns on her hands and wrists where a spill had scalded her. The fire god’s bees lived in houses far more splendid than any but the most exalted and fortunate of men. As if they knew it, the bees were singing quietly, contentedly, a hum deep enough to make ears tickle and hair lift on the back of the neck. “Yes, Mistress Chryssa,” said Qinnitan, meaning it. It was perhaps the thing she liked best about the Hive temple—the hives themselves, the bees, busy and serene. “They truly are.”

  “It is a wonderful day for us.” The chief acolyte was herself still a young woman, pretty in a thin-faced way when one learned to look past the scar that ran from her eye to her cheek. The scar made her the subject of much giggling speculation in the acolytes’ quarters. Qinnitan had never summoned the nerve to ask her how she had received it. “An entirely wonderful day. But for some reason, child, you do not seem entirely happy.”

  Qinnitan took a breath, suddenly shocked and frightened that her strange mood should show on her face. “Oh, no, Mistress I am the luckiest girl in the world to be here, to be a Hive Sister.”

  The chief acolyte didn’t look like she entirely believed her, but she nodded approvingly. “It’s true, there are probably more girls who would happily take your place here than there are grains of sand on the beach, and you have had the even greater good fortune of having caught the eye of Eminence Rugan herself. Otherwise a girl of your . . . otherwise you might not have been selected out of so many other worthy candidates.” Chryssa reached out and patted Qinnitan on the arm. “It was your clever tongue, you know, although you still need to learn when not to use it. I think Her Eminence has hopes you might be a chief acolyte yourself one day, which would be an even greater honor.” She nodded a little, acknowledging her own hard work and good fortune. “Still, it is a high, lonely calling, and sometimes it can be difficult to leave behind your family and friends. I know it was for me, when I was young.”

  Before Qinnitan could seize this chance to ask the revered and mysterious Mistress Chryssa some questions about her childhood before the temple, the nets in front of the hives billowed a little in a sudden draft, although the weight of hundreds of bees clinging to them kept them from moving too much. The breeze carried something through the great room, a whisper of sudden fear and excitement that made both the chief acolyte and her young charges straighten and turn to the door where the High Priestess had suddenly appeared, her arms held up, her hands open in the air like flowers.

  “Praises to the highest,” breathed Chryssa, “He is here!”

  Qinnitan got down on her knees beside the chief acolyte. A murmur of footsteps became louder, swishing and booming on the polished stone floors, as soldiers began to file in, each with a great curved sword on his belt and bearing on his shoulder a long, bell-mouthed tube of brightly polished figured steel—the Autarch’s Leopards, they had to be, no one else was allowed to wear that black-and-gold armor. It was astonishing she had never thought to see any men here in the Hive’s great portico, let alone a hundred of them with muskets. This rarity was followed by several dozen robed priests of Nushash, then an even larger troop of soldiers, these carrying more conventional but still frightening weapons, long spears and swords. At last the shuffling of feet stopped. Qinnitan sneaked a look over at Mistress Chryssa, whose face was radiant with excitement and something even stronger—a sort of joy.

  A vast litter appeared in the doorway, a thing of gold-painted wood and heavy curtains embroidered with the wide-winged falcon of the royal family. The brawny soldiers who held it set the litter down just to the side of the doorway and one of them leaped forward to pull back the curtains. Although none of the women in the temple chamber said a word, Qi
nni-tan thought she could feel them, dozens of them, all drawing breath at the same time. A face appeared from the shadows in the depths of the litter, picked out by the lanterns.

  Qinnitan swallowed, although for a moment it seemed impossible to do so. The autarch was a monster.

  No, not quite a monster she saw at her second glance, but the youth in the litter was bent and gnarled as though by extreme age and his head was far too large for his spindly body. He blinked and looked absently from side to side like a sleepy man realizing he has opened the wrong door, then withdrew into the darkness of his curtained bower once more.

  Even as Qinnitan gaped, the Leopard guards all lifted their guns off their shoulders, held them high, then slammed their feet against the floor with a deafening report—boom, boom! For a moment she thought the guns had all gone off, and some of the Hive Sisters let out shrieks of fear and dismay. As the echoes died, a half dozen more men in black-and-gold armor appeared in the doorway and then a figure almost as strange as the one in the litter followed them into the temple room.