by Tad Williams
“He will not tell us anything else.”Avin Brone looked almost as tired as Chaven had, his great body sagging. He would clearly have liked to sit down, but Briony did not call for a stool. “He simply says he did not kill your brother or his guards.”
“Pay no attention to this nonsense, Briony.” Gailon Tolly’s anger seemed genuine, and for once it was not aimed at her. “Would an innocent man not tell everything he knew? Shaso is taken by shame, that is all. Though I am surprised it could happen with such a villain.”
“But what if he is telling the truth, Duke Gailon?” Briony turned back to Brone. “Or what if he is not the only murderer? It still seems strange he should kill all three by himself.”
“Not so strange, Highness,” suggested the lord constable. “He is a deadly fighter, and they would not have been prepared—he would have caught them all unsuspecting. He likely stabbed the first guard and set on the second in a mere moment. Once the second guard was killed, he then attacked your unarmed brother.”
Briony felt queasy. She couldn’t bear to think too deeply about it— about Kendrick alone, helpless, holding up his arms, perhaps defending himself against a man he had known and trusted all his life. “And you still say there is no one else in the castle who could have done it, or even aided Shaso in the murder?”
“I have not said that, my lady. I’ve said that we cannot find any such person, despite our hardest labors, but it is not certain we ever could. Even at night, hundreds are quartered inside this keep. Captain Vansen and his guards have spoken to almost everyone, searched nearly every room, but there are ten hundred more that enter here during the hours of day who might have hidden, then escaped after the murder in the alarm and confusion.”
“Vansen.” She snorted, but then anger overcame her. “There are not ten hundred in the whole world who would want to kill my brother! But there are some, and I suspect I know many of them.” The courtiers stirred nervously and their whispers became even quieter. Many fewer were in the throne room than usual: dozens were keeping to their rooms or houses in fear, both of assassins and the fever. “Ten hundred, Lord Brone—that is wordplay! Are you telling me that the simpleton boy who brings the turnips from the Marnnswalk wagons might be one of Kendricks murderers? No, it is someone with something to gain.”
Brone frowned and cleared his throat. “You do me . . . and yourself . . . a disservice, Highness. Of course, what you say is true. However, though we must suspect almost everyone, we must insult no one needlessly. Would you have me mew up every noble who might be thought to benefit from the prince regent’s death? Is that your command?” He looked around the room and a sudden silence fell. The courtiers looked startled as geese caught in the open by a thunderstorm.
A part of her would indeed have liked to see all these idle, overdressed, and overpainted folk made to answer for themselves, but Briony knew that was just rage and despair One or two of them might well be guilty, might be part of a conspiracy with Shaso, but the rest would then be blameless and would rightly resent ill-treatment. The landowning nobility were not famous for their patience and humility. And if the Eddons did not have the support of the nobility, then the Eddons were nothing.
We’ve lost Father and Kendrick. I won’t lose our throne as well.
“Of course I don’t want that,” she said, measuring her words. “Rough times make for rough jokes, Lord Avin, so I forgive you, but please do not instruct me. I may be green in years, but in my father’s absence and my brother Barrick’s illness, I am the throne of Southmarch.”
Something flickered in Brone’s eyes, but he bowed his head. “I stand fairly chastised, Highness.”
Briony’s strength was failing. She badly needed to he down and sleep— she had not had more than a few unbroken hours of it for several nights. She wanted to see her twin well, and her other brother alive again. Most of all, she wanted her father back, someone who would hold her and protect her. She took a slow, deep breath. It did not matter what she wanted, of course: there would be no rest any time soon.
“No, Lord Brone, we all are chastised,” she said. “The gods humble us all.”
*
The face was twisted into something almost unrecognizable, but there was no question who it was. Barrick turned and ran. Smoke and flames swirled around him as though he had tumbled down one of the rooftop chimneys, or down a gash in the earth toward the regions of fire. His father came after, boots echoing on the flags, a fuming Kernios with beard ablaze and voice booming.
“Come here, child! You are making me very angry!”
The downward course of the stairs twisted in a great arc like the limbs of a wind-tortured tree, as blurry in the smoke as something seen beneath deep water, but it was his only escape and he did not hesitate. For a moment his feet were solid beneath him, but then a hand clawed at his back, snagged in his garments, tried to grapple him.
“Stop . . . !”
And then his feet were out from under him and he was tumbling down the steps beside the abyss, sliding, flung like a pebble, thumped and rattled down against hard stone until his breath was out of his body and his brains were out of his head. As he fell the voices of the whispering shadow-men became a shout, a roar, and all he could think was, Not again’
Oh, gods, not again . . .
He woke, shivering and weeping. He did not know where he was or even who he was.
A round man with a somber, kindly face bent over him, but for an instant it was that other face that he saw again, that familiar face twisted into a hateful mask and bearded in flame, and he shrieked and struck out. In his weakness his hand barely twitched, the shriek was a stifled moan.
“Rest,” the man said Chaven. His name was Chaven. “You have a fever, but there are people caring for you.”
Fever? he thought. It is no fever. The castle was on fire and they were under attack. Evil flowed inside the walls like poisoned blood in a dying man. Briony! He remembered her suddenly, and as if in imitation of their collateral birth, with her name his own came back as well. She has to know—she must be told. He strained again to make a noise, this time to speak “. . . Briony . . .”
“She is well, Highness. Drink this. “A beautiful coolness was poured into his throat, but he could not immediately remember how to swallow. When he had finished sputtering and coughing, and had taken a little more, Chaven’s cool hand touched his forehead. “Now sleep, Highnness.”
Barrick tried to shake his head. How could they not understand? He felt the darkness reach out to drag him down. He had to tell them about the shadow-men who swarmed the castle, about the fires. They had been hiding here for years, but now they had come out in full force. Perhaps the family’s enemies were only a few chambers away by now! And he also had to tell Briony about Father—what if he came to her? What if she did not know, did not understand, and let him in?
The darkness was pulling, sucking at him, making him liquid. “Tell Briony . . .” he managed, then slid beneath the surface of light once more, down into the burning depths.
*
Young Raemon Beck was finding it hard to think of anything but Helmingsea. They were still two days west of Southmarch and his home lay another two days ride beyond that, but he had been away for a month and a half and it was hard not to think of his wife and his two small boys, hard to keep his eagnerness under control.
Easier when we were in Settland and still weeks away from home, he thought. Easier when we had things to occupy us, bargaining, buying, selling. Now there is nothing left to do but ride and think.
He looked ahead along the line of their small caravan, almost a score of high-laden mules and half that many horses pulling wagons, all under the hand of his cousin Dannet Beck, who in turn ruled this mercantile venture on behalf of his father, Raemon’s uncle Dannet had made a few mistakes over the past weeks, Raemon thought—like many untried men, he was quick to take resistance to his authority as a personal slight—but overall he had not done badly, and the mules and wagons were loaded d
own with miles of the finest dyed wool thread from Settland ready for the factories of the March Kingdoms. And Raemon himself would benefit from this venture, not merely by his own share, which, though tiny, would still bring him more money than he had ever had in his twenty-five years—enough to leave his parents’ house, perhaps and build his own—but through greater responsibilities in the future, and someday perhaps a good-sized share in the family venture.
His improving fortunes aside, though, he mostly felt a breathless impatience to see Derla again and hold her close, to see his children and his own father and mother and to eat bread at his own table. Only a few days, but the wait seemed longer now than it did when the journey had only just begun.
We would go faster if we had not combined with that Settish prince’s daughter and her party. The girl, scarcely fourteen, with eyes like a frightened fawn, was being sent to marry Rorick Longarren, Earl of Daler’s Troth and a cousin of the Eddon family. From what Beck knew of Rorick, it seemed surprising that he would marry at all, let alone a girl of the remote and mountainous eastern lands, but royalty was royalty, it seemed, and any prince s daughter no mean prize.
Beck had nothing against the girl, and it was a reassurance even in these fairly peaceful times to have her dozen armored guards riding with the caravan, but she had been frequently ill; at least three times the groups had been forced to stop early for the day because of it, something that had driven homesick Raemon Beck almost to despair.
He looked back at the Settlanders, then ahead at the uneven procession of pack mules. One of the drovers saw him looking and waved, then pointed at the chinks between the trees and the cloudless autumn sky as if to say, “Look how lucky we are!” The first days of their return journey had been bitter with cold rain off the eastern mountains, so this was indeed a kindly change.
He waved back, but in truth he did not much like these forested hills. He remembered them from the outbound trip, how they seemed to loom and lower in the rain, and how they still did even under sunlit skies. Even on a fairly warm day such as this they bore their own thick mists along the summit and in the valleys between the slopes. In fact, a tongue of fog seemed to be stretching its way down along the hillside ahead of them even now, crawling through the trees and across the dark green grass toward the road.
Still, it is faster than going by sea, he thought. All that way south, down through the straits and up the eastern coast just to get there—I would have been parted from Derla and the boys for half a year. . . !
Someone shouted up ahead. Raemon Beck was startled to see that the tongue of fog had already covered the road at the front of the caravan. Beyond a score of paces he now could see little except dark tree shadows and the vague outline of men and of beasts of burden. He looked up. The sky had swiftly gone dark, as though the mist crept above the trees as well as below.
A storm . . . ?
The shouting was quite loud now, with a strange edge to it—he heard not just confusion or irritation in the men’s voices, but real fear. The hairs rose on his neck and arms.
An attack? Bandits, taking advantage of the sudden fog? He looked for the armored men who escorted the prince’s daughter, saw two of them thunder out of the mist and hurtle past him, and realized to his dismay that the fog was behind him now as well. They were all adrift in it like a boat on the ocean.
Even as he squinted into the mist, a shape leaped out and his horse reared in terror. Raemon Beck had only a moment to glimpse what had frightened his mount, but that moment was enough to make his heart stumble and almost stop with fright; it was a thing of tatters and cobwebs that flailed at him—pale, long-armed, and eyeless—with a mouth as ragged as a torn sack.
His horse reared again and then stumbled as its feet touched the earth. Beck had to cling for his life. Men were screaming all around him now— horses, too, dreadful shrieks unlike anything he had ever heard.
Shapes staggered in and out of the mist, men and other things, grappling, struggling. Some of the voices he had first thought were his companions he now could hear were calling or even singing in some unfamiliar language More of the tattered things came twitching up out of the brush, but they made up only a small share of the bizarre shapes that danced and gibbered through the mist. Some of the attackers seemed only a little more substantial than the fog itself. Men and horses still screamed, but now the terrible sounds began to grow more faint, as though the mist were thickening into something heavy as stone, or as though Raemon himself had fallen into a hole that was now being filled in atop him.
A group of tiny, red-eyed shapes like malevolent bearded children leaped out of the grass and clawed at his stirrups. His horse kicked its way through them and bolted in shrilling panic. Branches lashed Raemon Beck’s face, but then a heavier limb snatched him completely out of the saddle and flung him to the ground, knocking out his breath and his wits in one blow.
He woke feeling like a sack of broken eggs. For a heart-clutching moment he saw a face peering down at him from the fog that still swirled all around—a strangely beautiful face, but cold and lifeless as one of the godly statues on a Trigon temple. He held his breath as though he might that way escape the demon’s attention, but it only stared at him. Its skin was pale, its eyes shiny as candleflame behind the thick glass of a temple window. He thought it was male, but truly it was hard to think of it as anything so simple and human. Then it was gone, simply vanished, and the fog swirled down around him and turned the world gray.
Raemon Beck squeezed his eyes shut and gasped for breath, waiting to die. When he had stayed unmoving long enough to become aware of his achmg back and ribs, of the pounding of his head and the countless cuts and scratches on his skin, he opened his eyes once more. The fog was gone. He was in the shade of a deep dell, but he could see bits of blue sky above him through the leaves.
He sat up and looked around. The dell was empty.
Beck dragged himself to his feet, wincing but doing his best to remain silent, then crept back along the path of broken branches left by his horse’s flight from the road. There was no sign of the horse. There was no noise from any animals or men. Beck braced himself for the terrible scene he knew he would find.
He reached the road. A horse—not his own, but one of the caravan’s— stood there as if waiting for him. Its sides were heaving but it was otherwise unharmed, cropping grass by the roadside. As he walked toward it the horse startled a bit, then allowed itself to be stroked. After a moment it quieted and returned to grazing.
Other than this one animal, the road was empty. Of the dozens of men and horses and mules, the wool wagons, the armored soldiers, and the prince’s daughter, not to mention whatever army of nightmares had attacked them, no sign remained. Even the fog had vanished.
Terror and disbelief squeezed him like a brutal hand. Raemon Beck felt his stomach convulse, then he brought up the remains of his morning meal. He wiped his mouth and clambered hurriedly into the horse’s saddle, grunting at the pain in his ribs and back. His companions had disappeared so completely there was nowhere he could think of to begin a search, and in any case he did not want to search, did not want to spend another instant in this haunted spot. He only wanted to ride and ride until he reached a place where people lived.
He knew he could never come into these hills again. If that meant he must give up his place in the family venture and his wife and children must join him begging for coppers in the street, there was no help for it.
He kicked his heels against his new mount’s ribs and started east, huddled low against the horse s neck and weeping.
*
It was early in the morning and she couldn’t sleep—had not slept all night, despite immense weariness. Briony lay in her bed staring into the darkness, listening to the slumber sounds of Rose and Moina and three other young noblewomen who were staying in the castle on this night before Kendrick’s funeral. How could any of them sleep, she wondered. Did they not know that everything was in danger—that the entire kingdom tottered?
If Shaso was the murderer and had acted alone, there could be no comprehensible reason for it, and so how could she trust anyone ever again? If somehow he had been suborned, or if someone else performed this terrible murder and painted him with the blame, then the Eddons had been purposefully struck to the heart by a terrible enemy, and struck as they slept in their own house. How could anyone ever sleep again?
Her heart had begun beating swiftly even before she realized what the new sound was: a quiet knock at the door of her chamber. There were guards outside, she knew. Even that careless fool Ferras Vansen would not leave her unguarded at a time like this. She pulled a cloak over her nightdress—the room and the stone floors were cold—and started toward the door.