by Tad Williams
“What is this?” he asked, holding up the sack Whatever it held so snugly was hard and almost as heavy as stone. The top of the bag was sewed shut, but the threadwork on the rest of it was intricate and beautiful. “Where did you find this, boy?"
“He didn’t,” said Opal in the doorway. “He was wearing it when we found him. It’s his, Chert.”
“What’s in it?"
“I don’t know. It isn’t ours to open, and he hasn’t wanted to.”
“But this could have I don’t know, perhaps something in it telling of his real parents. A piece of jewelry with his family name on it, perhaps.” Or a costly heirloom that might help pay for his room and board, Chert could not help thinking.
“It is his,” said Opal again, quietly. She knelt beside the boy and stroked his pale hair and Chert suddenly understood that she didn’t necessarily want to find out the boy’s true name, his parent’s names . . .
“Well,” he began, looking at the sack, but now his attention was caught by the stone. What he had at first thought was only a sedimentary lump polished by rain or sea, or perhaps even just a weathered piece of pottery, was something much stranger. It was a stone, that seemed clear, but as he stared at it, he realized it was of a kind he had never seen before, nor could he even recognize where it fit in the Family of Stones and Metals. A Funderling not recognizing a stone’s family was something like a dairy farmer stumbling across not just a new breed of cow, but one that could fly.
“Look at this,” he said to Opal. “Can you make anything of it?”
“Cloudchip?” she suggested, naming an obscure kind of crystal. “Earth-ice?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s neither of those. Flint, where did you find this stone, boy?"
“In the garden place. Outside where you were digging.” The boy stuck out his hand. “Give them back.”
Chert glanced from the boy to the bag on a cord, the mysterious, sewn-shut bag. He handed it back to Flint but hung onto the murky crystal. He and Opal would need to talk about this mysterious legacy, but there was no sense worrying about everything at once. “I’m going to take this stone,” he told the child. “Not to keep, but because I’ve never seen anything like it and I want to see if someone can tell me what it is.” He looked at the boy, who stared back expectantly. It took Chert a moment to understand why. “If I may, that is,” he said. “You found it, after all.”
The boy nodded, satisfied. As Chert and Opal went out, Flint rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling as he squeezed the little leather bag between his fingers.
Opal returned to her clearing up, but Chert only sat, turning the crystal over and over in his hand. It seemed to have an artificial shape, that was the strange thing, a regularity—it appeared to have been chipped out of some larger piece, but there were no fracture-markings, in fact, the edges were quite rounded. And it was definitely, incontrovertibly, something he had not seen before. A dark spot seemed to move in its depths.
It troubled him, and the more he thought about it the more troubled he grew. It seemed like something that could only have come from behind the Shadowline, but if so, what was it doing deep inside Southmarch Castle? And was it coincidence that the boy found it in the cemetery, only a few hundred steps from the chambers where the prince regent was murdered? Or that the boy from beyond the Shadowline had been the one who found it’
He looked at Opal, who was contentedly darning a hole in the knee of Flint’s breeches. He desperately wanted to ask her opinion, but knew he was going to spend a mostly sleepless night himself and was reluctant to rob her of what might be her last contented slumber for some time. Because a fear was growing inside him.
What was it that Chaven had said? “Do not doubt that if the Shadowline sweeps across us, it will bring with it a dark, dark evil.”
Let Opal at least have this night, he decided Let her be happy this one night.
“You’re quiet, Chert. Are you feeling poorly?"
“All is well, my old darling,” he said. “Never fear.”
10
Halls of Fire
INVOCATION:
Here is the kingdom, here are its tears
Two sticks
Nothing is known about any day that is past
—from The Bonefall Oracles
It was always bad in the lands of sleep, but this was worse than the other nights, far worse. The long halls of Southmarch were again full of the shadow-men, the insubstantial but relentless figures who dripped and flowed like black blood, who oozed from the cracks between the stones and then took shape, faceless and whispering. But this night, everywhere they went, flames followed them, blazing up in the wake of their pursuit, until it seemed as though the very air would catch fire.
Everywhere he went more of them appeared, oozing up from beneath the flagstones, clotting as they slid or shuffled after him, solidifying into vague man-shapes. Eyeless, still they stared, and they called mouthlessly after him, noises of both threat and promise. They followed him, many still joined to their brethren in a near-solid mass, and fire came behind them, catching in the tapestries and licking upward toward the ancient ceiling as the faceless men followed his hopeless attempt at flight from room to room, through corridor after corridor.
They killed Kendrick! His heart seemed lopsided in his chest; his lungs burned. Room after room was wreathed in flame, but still the dark men swarmed after him.
They want to kill me, too—kill us all! The air was so hot it scorched his nostrils and crackled in his throat, as though the entire palace had become an oven. These phantoms of soot, shadow, and blood had killed his brother and now they would kill him, too, chase him like a wounded deer and hound him to his death through endless halls of flame. . . .
*
“Make him well!”
Chaven stood slowly. At his feet, the page who crouched beside Barrick’s bed dabbed at the prince’s brow with a wet cloth. “It is not so easy, Princess . . .”
“I don’t care! My brother is burning up with fever!” Briony felt a balance inside her tipping dangerously.”He is in pain!”
Chaven shook his head. “With all respect, I think not so much, Highness. It is one of the boons of fever—it clouds much of the hurt of the illness and lets the mind float free of the body.”
“Float free?” She struggled to control herself but her finger was trembling as she pointed at her writhing, moaning twin. “Look at him! Do you think he is free of anything?”
The other physician, Brother Okros, cleared his throat. “Actually, my lady, we have seen others afflicted this way, but in a few days many have been well again.”
She turned on this small, diffident man who had come from Eastmarch Academy in the mainland town to consult with Chaven. Okros took a step back as though she might hit him, and for a moment she felt a hysterical sense of pleasure at his fear, at the power of her own anger. “Yes? Many? What does that mean? And how long have you all known about this fever-plague?”
“Since the ending of the last festival month, Highness.” There was a slight squeak in his voice. Okros was a priest, but mostly in name only, a teacher of the sciences who had probably seldom set foot in a Trigon temple since his ordainment. “Your brother—your other brother—was informed by the academy when the first groups of sufferers began to come to us. But he . . .”
“Was killed? Yes.” She took a deep breath, but it did not calm her. “Yes, that might explain why he hasn’t given his time to this issue. Did you plan to wait until everyone else in my family was dead from one thing or another before mentioning this plague to me?"
“Please, Princess,” said Chaven. “Briony Please.”
The use of her name caught her for a moment, made her look at the court physician. She couldn’t quite read the expression on his round face, but it was clear he was trying to tell her something. I am making a fool of myself that is what. She looked around at the servants and guards in Barrick’s room and knew there were more castle folk outside, no doubt with their ears pressed to th
e door. She blinked against what felt like the beginning of tears. I am frightening everyone.
“It is not a plague, Highness,” Okros said carefully. “Not yet. We have fever seasons like this almost every year. This is simply more severe than most.”
“Just tell me what will happen to my brother.”
“His elements are out of balance,” Chaven explained. “He is full of fire, at least in a sense. I do not want to insult you with what may seem like old superstitions, but it is hard to explain illness without also explaining how the elements within us correspond to the elements without—in our earth and in our firmament.” He rubbed his head wearily. “So I will only say that his blood is too heated because the elements are out of balance. Normally the elements of earth and water already inside him would serve to keep that balance, just as stones ring a blaze and water extinguishes it when necessary. But he is all fire and air at the moment, gusting and burning.”
Gusting and burning. She looked down in horror at Barrick’s dear face, so contorted now and so oblivious. Oh, merciful Zoria, please don’t take him from me. Don’t leave me alone in this haunted place. Please.
“Many have already survived this fever, Princess,” said little Brother Okros. “We have had news of it from southern travelers in prior days. It has already been in Syan and Jellon for months.”
“Perhaps it came in with the ship from Hierosol,” Chaven suggested. He had tugged the page boy away and was examining Barrick again, smelling his breath. Briony’s twin was a little quieter, but he still murmured worriedly in his sleep, his face sparkling with sweat.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. It was the bleak and ruthless will of the gods, the dark wings she had felt spreading above them all. It was her every dire premonition coming true. “It doesn’t matter where it came from. Just tell me this—how many die from it and how many live?”
“We hate to make pronouncements of that type, my lady,” began the academy physician.
Chaven frowned at him. “At least half have survived. Unless they were babies or old folk.”
“Half?” She was on the verge of shrieking again. She closed her eyes and felt the world spinning around her. All had gone mad. All had gone completely mad. “And what is the treatment?”
“Open windows,” Okros said promptly .“Dirt from the temple of Kernios beneath the head and foot of his bed. And wrap him in wet cloths—water from Envor’s temple basins would be particularly good, and we must make prayers to Erivor, of course, since he is your family’s special patron. All this will serve to soothe the influence of fire and air.”
“There are also herbs that might help.” As Chaven rubbed at his forehead again, considering, Briony noticed for the first time that the court physician looked dreadful. His features were pale and sagging, and he carried circles dark as bruises beneath his eyes. “Willow bark. And tea made from elder flowers might also help bring down the fever.
“We should bleed him as well,” added Okros, glad to be talking about something meaningful. “A bit less blood will ease his suffering.”
Briony nudged Chaven to one side, none too gently, and with an immense rustling of skirts sank down beside her brother. These clothes keep me trussed like a troublesome horse, she thought as she struggled to find a comfortable position. Or a captured thief. It hurts even to bend.
Her brother’s eyes were mere slits, but his pupils darted about between the lids.
“Barrick? It’s me, Briony. Oh, please, can’t you hear me?” She touched his cheek then took his hand, despite its warmth, it was damp as something found in a rock pool. “I won’t leave you.”
“You must leave him, my lady,” said a new voice Briony looked up to see Avin Brone standing in the doorway, filling it with his bulk. “I beg your pardon, but the truth must be told. There is much to do. Tomorrow we bury the prince regent. Tomorrow someone must take up the scepter so that the people can see an Eddon still sits the throne. If Prince Barrick is too ill, then it must be you. And I have other news for you as well.”
She felt a weird little thrill So the only person I can absolutely trust not to send me to Ludis, she realized, will be on that throne. For a moment she had an image of all the things she might do, all the petty wrongs she could reverse.
Then she looked down at Barrick again and the idea of what she might accomplish seemed pointless.
“How many are sick with this?” she asked Chaven.
“How many have the fever now?” He looked at the physician from the academy. “A few hundred in the town, perhaps. Is that right, Okros? And a dozen or so in the castle. Three of the kitchen servants, I think. Your stepmother’s maid and two of Barrick’s own pages.” He patted the head of the little boy who held the wet cloth. “Those are the ones I knew about when your brother began to sicken.”
“Anissa’s maid? But how is Anissa herself?”
“Your stepmother is well and so is the baby she carries.”
“And none of those who came with that man Dawet have the fever?”
Chaven shook his head.
“Strange it should be brought on their ship and yet none of them should sicken.”
“Yes, but fever is a strange thing,” said this pale, battered-looking Chaven—a man who almost seemed a stranger to her. She found herself wondering for perhaps the first time ever in her life what he did when he was by himself, “what life and thoughts he kept secret from others, as everyone did. “It can touch one and leave another standing just beside him unharmed.”
“Like murder,” she said.
Briony was almost the only one in the room who did not make the sign to ward away evil after she had spoken. Even Barrick groaned in his fevered sleep.
*
He had run until he was beyond the immediate reach of the faceless shapes, the whisperers, but he knew they were still somewhere behind him, flowing through the honeycombed rooms, sniffing for him like dogs. He was in a wing of the castle he didn’t know, chamber after chamber of dusty, unfamiliar objects flung around without order or care. A broken orrery stood on a table, metal arms bent so that they protruded in all directions like the quills of some spiky creature Carpets and tapestries were draped across each other, bunched and crumpled at the edges, even spread onto the timbered celling so that it was somehow difficult to tell which way was up, and they were beginning to curl with the rising heat.
He stopped. Someone—or something—was calling his name.
“Barrick! Where are you?”
He realized with a spasm of terror that it was not only the shadow-men who were looking for him, the men of smoke and blood, but something else as well. Something dark and tall and singular. Something that had been hunting him a long, long time.
His swift walk became a run. Moments later it became a wild, headlong dash. Still his own name floated to him like a lonely echo from one benighted mountaintop to another, or like the cry of some lost soul stranded upon the moon.
“Bamck? Come back!”
He was in a long corridor open on one side, he realized, sprinting through a gallery that dropped away next to him, a dizzying plunge to the stone flags just a misstep away. All the castle must be afire now—here the tapestries were burning at the bottom edges, flames beginning to lick their way up the stylized hunting scenes and representations of adventuring gods and ancient kings seated in glory.
“Barrick?”
He pulled up, heart speeding. The flames were climbing higher, the gallery filling with black smoke. He could feel a baking heat all down his right side that hurt his skin. He wanted to run, but something was moving in the smoke ahead of him, something stained red and orange by leaping firelight.
“I am angry. Very angry.”
Barrick’s heart felt as though it might crack his breastbone. The shape trudged out of the murk, smoke dripping down its length like water, fire curling in the dark beard.
“You shouldn’t run from me, boy “ His father’s stare was dull and empty, cloudy as the eyes of a dead fish i
n a bucket. “Shouldn’t run. It makes me angry with you.”
*
For all her discontent with her clothing, Briony was glad for once that Moina and Rose had laced her so tightly, glad that her embroidered stomacher was stiff as armor. It seemed to be all that held her upright on her battered wooden chair—the chair that at least for this mad moment had become the throne of all the March Kingdoms.
Did anyone else feel the same as she did? Did everyone? Were all these castle folk in their ornate finery no more than confused souls hiding inside costumes, as the hard shells of snails protected the helpless, naked things that lived within them?
“He says what?” She was frightened again, even if she forced herself not to show it. She fought hard to keep her eyes on the lord constable, not to let her glance dart into the shadows in anxious search for the assassins and traitors who had seemed all around her in the terrible hour of Kendrick’s death, but whose phantom presences had been mostly absent since Shaso’s capture. “But we found the bloody knife—surely you have told him that. What does he claim?”