by Tad Williams
“A good idea, but let’s hear what the scouts say first.” The earl turned to his squire. “Tell Rorick and Mayne and Sivney Fiddicks to join me on the hill there.The young prince, too, of course—wouldn’t do to leave him out Oh, and Brenhall—he’s probably under a tree somewhere, sleeping off his noon meal.”
Vansen barely heard the last of this as the earl’s other squire helped him into the saddle, then he spurred away to meet the scouts.
“But how many are they, curse it?” Tyne tugged at his mustache and looked as though he would like to slap Gar Doiney. “How many times must I ask?”
“I’m sorry, your lordship.” The scout’s voice was dry and cracked, as if he didn’t use it much. “I’ve heard you, sire, it’s just hard to answer, like. With mist and such we can only just tell they’re camped on the hilltop and in the trees. We rode around the long way for a better look—that’s why we’re so long back.” He shook his head. The scar between Doiney’s eye and mouth that pulled up his lip and made him seem to smirk had gotten him into trouble before now, and Vansen guessed it might have had something to do with the man’s choice of a usually solitary profession—but Vansen felt sure that even in his anger Tyne couldn’t fail to mark the skittish look on the scout’s weathered, bony face. Even a hardened, taciturn campaigner like Doiney was disturbed by this unknown, unnatural enemy. “Come back with us, sire—there must be an hour still of light. You’ll see. It’s hard to make out anything. But there are hundreds there, thousands perhaps.”
Tyne waved his hand. “It’s only that it is dangerous to have to guess. At least we know where they are.”
“And you are certain there are no more of them anywhere else?" young Prince Barrick asked. He had joined the circle on the hillside, the nobles standing close together to provide each other some protection from the stiffening wind. The prince looked interested—almost too interested, Vansen thought, as if he had forgotten that the men unrolling their bedrolls would soon have to cross swords with this interesting phenomenon, that some of them would almost certainly die. It was hard for Vansen not to feel a little resentment on behalf of Dab Dawley and all the other soldiers not much older than the prince who would not be surrounded and protected as Barrick would be, to make certain their experience of battle didn’t become too dangerous.
But who is it asked me to take care of the lad, to protect him? Was it the prince himself? No, it was his sister Perhaps I do him a disservice. Vansen was unsure again sometimes Barrick Eddon seemed a mere boy, younger even than his years, petulant and anxious, at other moments he seemed a hundred years old, far beyond anything so mundane as fear of death.
“If Your Highness means perhaps it is a token force to draw us, with the rest in ambush,” said Doiney, awkward and uncomfortable at speaking to royalty, “then I say anything is possible, your good Highness, but if they have another force squirreled away, they are either so small they are hiding under the clovers or they are floating on a cloud in the sky, like, or whatever it is they say fairy folk do. Because of the morning mist we did not mark the ones on the hill until our way back, and we rode far across these lands on both sides of the Settland Road and up the far reaches of the old Northmarch way as well, across all kinds of ground.” He stopped, clearly trying to think it all through, to make sure that he had said what he meant to say. Vansen had never heard so many words out of the man in all the years he had known him. “Meaning to say, Highness, by your pardon, there are none others we can see for miles beyond except for those as are nearly on top of us.”
“What do they look like?" asked Rorick, his voice a little too gruffly ordinary to be quite believable.
“Hard to tell,” Doiney told him. “Apologies, your lordship, but it’s that cursed mist and those trees. But we could see some of them in what looked like good, plain armor, not much different than you or me, and there were horses and tents and and all you’d expect. But there were other shapes too, in the trees . . .” He trailed off, made the pass-evil. “Shapes that didn’t seem right at all, what we saw of them.”
Tyne stepped backward until the tree was almost against his spine. He peered out into the distance, although the wooded high place the Twilight People seemed to have chosen as their camp was blocked from view by the intervening hills. “First things first, then,” he said. “Vansen, we need a string of pickets across the hills behind them and some miles down both roads, changed often enough that they won’t start to see shapes in the night that aren’t there, but do see the ones that truly are. They must keep ears open, too. If there is some other force coming—if it is a trap—we must know about it before they arrive. And let’s have the rest start making camp.” Tyne’s sergeant ran down the hill to give the orders.
Vansen leaned over and had a few quick words with Gar Domey as the nobles talked quietly among themselves. “But the others that Muchmore took out have been back since noontime,” Vansen finished, “so tell him it’s them I want out, and you get your fellows something to drink and eat.”
Doiney nodded, then bowed to the nobles and made a clumsy, unaccustomed leg for the prince before he swung himself back onto his horse again. He cantered back toward his little troop of horsemen, visibly relieved to escape the councils of the great.
Vansen stared at the blossoming campfires. They were a reassuring sight against the descending twilight and he decided that Earl Tyne was a thoughtful commander it was doubtful the enemy was ignorant of their arrival, and the fires would give the men much-needed heart’s ease through a long, worrisome night.
“So what do we do, then, Lord Aldritch?” asked the prince. “Do you think they will they stand and fight?"
“If they won’t, then we have learned something useful,” Tyne told him. “But do not doubt that I fear a trap as much as you do, Highness, although I suspect we may be overthinking. Still, if they break and run we should not follow them, in case they mean to lead us into the place we have heard about, beyond the Shadowline where everyone runs mad.”
“Almost everyone. Not our Captain Vansen.” It was hard to tell how Prince Barrick meant it, as compliment or gibe.
Vansen broke the short silence. “If my experience is to be of use, then I must remind everyone that my men and I had no idea we were crossing over into into those lands so I think Earl Tyne speaks wisely If we best them, even if we seem to break them, still we should go slowly and carefully.”
Barrick Eddon stared at him for a moment, gave a sober nod, then looked around at the others and realized they were all watching him. “What, do you wait for me? I’m not a general, not even a soldier yet. I’ve said that and I mean it. Aldritch, you and the others must decide.”
The Earl of Blueshore cleared his throat. “Well, Highness, then I say we must be alert and on guard all this evening, and double the usual sentries— and that is not counting your pickets, Vansen. If these shadow folk do not stir, then in the morning when the light comes back, we will go up and test their strength. I do not think any of us much wants to go against them in these unfamiliar fields when the sun is setting.”
There were nods and a few grunts of agreement, but otherwise nobody said anything. There was no need.
*
Chert had been up and down the shore of the quicksilver sea a hundred times, it seemed, calling and calling until he was quite dizzy, with no reply except echoes. He had discovered no hint of a way across the liquid metal, no bridge, no mooring post, and—as best he could tell in the inconstant, flickering light—no boat on the shore at the far side. He had discovered one thing, though somewhere in the blue-and-rose-shot darkness above his head some sort of cleft must open to the distant surface, a rock chimney of sorts where the fumes could disperse into the air above Brenn’s Bay. Chert knew enough about quicksilver to know that if this were the true stuff, unaired, he likely would be not just light-headed but dead or dying.
He wondered if that could be the answer to the puzzle—could the boy have somehow come down onto the island from above? But what had Beet
ledown been following if it hadn’t been Flint’s scent? And how could the boy have gotten down from such a height? The rock face on the side of the silver sea—the side Chert couldn’t reach—was distant from the island, at least as far from it as the side where he stood. He had a momentary, fanciful vision of the child somehow drifting down like a mote of dust or a bit of mushroom spore, but that was ridiculous. Flint might have come from behind the Shadowline, he might be a good climber, but he had given no sign whatsoever of being able to fly.
Still, Chert walked back to the slope below the jut of stone balcony where he himself had entered and stared up the jagged face, scouting with his eye up the deer track—the ghost-deer track as he now had to think of it— wondering if there was some other way across from near the Maze itself, some high path made invisible by a trick of the light. Sighing—a sigh that the thick, hot air quickly turned into a wheeze and then a cough—he clambered back up the slope.
He paused on the balcony of the Maze, peering out at the weird glow of the Shining Man that filled the great cavern without fully illuminating it, then took out his remaining chunk of lantern-coral to make his way back through the Maze. He was glad he had reclaimed it and did not have to traverse the labyrinth in darkness again—it had been too much like his age-ceremony, too much like that sense of helplessness when he had been forced to march without touching any of his peers, following the voice of an acolyte he could not see, a voice made strange and inhuman by the dark and the echoes. But this time he would have light . .
How did Flint get through the Maze, then? It was a question he should have asked before, and Chert was again angry with himself. Did Flint go to the Salt Pool first for a piece of Boulder’s wares? Somehow Chert didn’t believe it—the little man would have said something. But how could the child have made his way through the Maze in utter blackness otherwise?
For that matter, how did he find his way around down here at all? It was a mystery to rival the strangest parts of the tale of Kermos and his fabulous battles.
Chert paused for a short rest, wondering what time of day it was now, since even his Funderling sense of how time passed in the skyless depths had been compromised by this place, then slowly made his way back through the twisting Maze. He emerged into the soft, warm light of Emberstone Reach without having discovered a single hint of how the boy might have made his way across the Sea in the Depths, or even any sign of Flint’s passage at all. Chert turned and began to make his weary way through the Maze again, more and more certain he would never know what had happened to the boy, but this time, in his exhaustion, he took a wrong turning and found himself in a section of the labyrinth he had not entered before. He could tell because it felt different beneath his feet, and he realized for the first time that the route between the Reach and the feature called the Balcony had been worn low in the middle over the centuries by the shuffling passage of innumerable feet. He also abruptly understood at least one of the ways that the acolytes made their way through the Maze in darkness. Now he found himself in a part of it where the floor stones were smoothly level, as if no one had ever walked on them before.
He fought down a moment of panic. Even if he was lost, surely he would be no worse off here than wandering the shore of the quicksilver sea. The temple brothers, if they came, were the guardians of the Maze. They should know its every corner.
Still, he could not forget his own proverbial bad luck. They should, yes. But perhaps they don’t.
Chert did his best to retrace his steps, but he had been distracted when he chose the wrong path and couldn’t remember how long he had walked or how many times he had turned before realizing his mistake Chert held his glowing chunk of coral up to the slate walls, seeking some sort of clue, but although they were covered with the same indecipherable carvings as the Maze’s more familiar reaches—vast, wall-wide figures with huge eyes and contorted limbs, as well as curls and dots of what looked like writing but in no script he had seen anywhere else—it was all too much the same from wall to wall and room to room to help him find his way.
Still, I’ve seen what not many other than the Metamorphic Brothers can have seen, he thought, recalling his journey through blackness in his coming-of-age ceremony What does it all mean? Can the brothers read it?
The face and words of Brother Nickel came back to him suddenly—the odd look in the man’s eyes as he told of their elder, Grandfather Sulphur, and his dreams that “An hour is coming when Old Night will reach out that our days of freedom are over.” Chert shivered despite the thick heat of the place. Here in the depths, wandering beneath the eyes of these supernatural beings, it was easy to feel the breath of Old Night on the back of his neck.
He turned sharply, suddenly convinced that something was following him, but the corridor behind him was empty. I am making it worse, he thought. I should stop and wait until the temple brothers come.
And if the light from his coral finally died while he waited’ Darkness had never frightened Chert before, but now it was a dreadful thought.
He turned another corner and found himself in a dead-end facing three stone walls. Vast faces carved on those walls stared down at him so that he felt like a child surrounded by angry parents. He let out a little gasp of surprise and heard it echo and fade, but before he stopped walking he could hear something else as well, a hollowness in his footfalls, an echo that had not been there before. It confused him—for a moment he thought someone else was in the Maze with him—but then he crouched down and held the gleaming coral close. He stared at the scratches on the stone flags, then rapped on them with his knuckle. The sound was unquestionably different.
Chert pried at the edge of one of the stones and to his astonishment it rose a little in his hands, shuddering as it slid out of its collar of ancient mortar. Then, as he strained and heaved, it was not just one that rose, but four stones together. He got the fingers of both hands under it and, growling and moaning with the strain, lifted the whole mass like the cover of a cistern and slid it rasping to one side. The conjoined stones made a rough square less than a big-one’s yard across and were no thicker than the width of Chert’s closed fist. Beneath the spot where they had lain was darkness.
A little heat and a stronger smell of the quicksilver sea floated up from the opening Chert leaned over and poked the coral light into it Stairs, steep stairs, wound down and away before vanishing in the depths. He sat up, rubbing his head Was this what the boy had found? Or was it merely some other part of the Mysteries, a path that would lead him to a worse fate even than being stranded in darkness in the Maze’
It’s not like I’ve anything better to do, he told himself. And if the Elders are angry with me well, surely this won’t make it any worse.
He had heard better arguments, but he carefully let himself down through the opening, then squatted on one of the lower steps to look as far down the crude little stairwell as he could, just in case the whole thing might come to a sudden end a few yards deeper and fall away beneath his feet, pitching him down into some abyss. Although the tunnel looked far less carefully finished in its construction than the rest of the Maze, it still seemed solid Funderling work and there were no sudden drops in view. As he cautiously inched down a few more steps, he looked up and saw that a slot had been cut into the bottom of one of the four stones that covered the hole, a handhold to drag the cover back into place from below.
Not very likely I’ll be doing that, he thought, but he wondered how Flint could have managed to do it if he had descended these stairs. The boy was wiry, but was he that strong?
All this thinking gave Chert another idea and he crawled back out of the hole. He untied the shirt he had been wearing around his waist since he had got it back from Beetledown—it was far too hot down here for him to have felt any need of it—and tossed it out to the mouth of the dead-end so that someone in the passage would be able to see it without turning the corner.
With the stone cover off the opening, I couldn’t give the temple brothers a better id
ea of where I’ve gone if I wrote them a letter.
Feeling a little heartened despite his worries over what might be waiting in this narrow place, Chert Blue Quartz began to make his way down the stairs.
Either the quicksilver vapors were truly much stronger here or something else about the downward passage was . . . Strange . . . because Chert was finding it hard to keep his mind on the very important task of not falling down the narrow steps.
The stairwell was largely featureless! every few dozen steps he passed a string of symbols that might have been a single, enlarged word, rendered in the same stylized writing he had seen above, but there were no faces on these walls, no figures Still, he couldn’t escape the idea that things were moving around him, and that the failing light of his coral was being reflected back at him somehow from the bare walls as though it bounced off something less opaque than mere stone, as though the stairwell burrowed down not through the castle’s well-known limestone, but some huge, murky crystal. The dimensions of the place seemed to change, too, swelling and contracting even as he continued his trudge downward. For a time he couldn’t make sense anymore of how he had found his way here, and he became gripped by the dreadful certainty that he was descending the living stone throat of the Shining Man, being swallowed down into the heart of the Mysteries. Then the sensation passed, replaced by flickers of light all around him like the sparks that danced on the inside of closed eyelids. Wordless whispers swam up the stairwell, a dull and distant rush like waves crashing on a shore, and superstitious terror gripped him again.