by Tad Williams
He was certainly a surprise to me, Briony thought I suppose it’s been just as long since they’ve seen him here either. “I’ve come as invited, to have a Winter’s Eve drink with my stepmother,” she told the young woman.
“She is over there.” Selia’s Devonisian accent was a little stronger than Briony remembered, as though being caught off-guard made it harder for the young woman to speak well. The room was dark except for low flames in the fireplace and a few candles, and none of the usual crowd of serving-women or even the midwife appeared to be present. Briony walked to the bed and pulled back the curtains. Her stepmother was sleeping with her mouth open and her hands curled protectively across her belly. Briony gently rubbed her shoulder.
“Anissa. It’s me, Briony. I’ve come to have a drink with you and wish you a good Orphan’s Day.”
Anissa’s eyes fluttered open, but for a moment they didn’t seem to take in much of anything. Then they found her stepdaughter and widened the way Selia’s had when she saw Chaven. “Briony? What are you doing here? Is Barrick with you?”
“No, Anissa,” she said gently. “He has gone with the Earl of Blueshore and the others, don’t you remember?”
The small woman tried to sit up, groaned, then got her elbows planted in the cushions and finally managed to lever herself upright. “Yes, of course, I am still sleepy. This child, it makes me sleep all the time!” She looked Briony up and down, frowned. “But what brings you here, dear girl?”
“You invited me. It’s Winter’s Eve. Don’t you remember?”
“Did I?” She looked around the room. “Where are Hisolda and the others? Selia, why are they not here?”
“You sent them away, Mistress. You are still full of sleep, that is all, and you forget.”
But now Anissa noticed Chaven and again she showed surprise. “Doctor? Ah, is it truly you? Why are you here? Is something wrong with the child?”
He joined Briony by the bedside. “No, I don’t believe so,” he said, but with little of his usual good humor.
Anissa detected this and her face tightened. “What? What is wrong? You must tell me.”
“I shall,” said Chaven. “If the princess regent will allow me a moment’s indulgence. But first I think she should call in the guards.”
“Guards?” Anissa struggled hard to get out of bed now, her skin pale, voice increasingly shrill. “Why guards? What is going on? Tell me! I am the king’s wife!”
Briony was completely bewildered, but allowed Chaven to move to the door and invite in young Millward and his stubbled comrade, both of whom looked more nervous to be in the queen’s bedroom than if they had faced an armed foe. Selia moved to where her mistress now sat on the edge of the bed, the queen’s pale little feet dangling down without quite reaching the floor. The maid put a protective arm around Anissa’s shoulders and looked defiantly back at Chaven.
“You are giving fright to me,” the queen said, her accent thicker now, too. “Briony, what are you doing here? Why are you treating me so?”
Briony didn’t answer her stepmother, but couldn’t help wondering if she had been too quick to let Chaven have his way. Perhaps he had disappeared because he was deranged. She caught young Millward’s eye and did her best to hold it for a moment, trying to let the guardsman know to watch her, not the physician, while waiting to be told what to do.
“If you are innocent, madam, I will beg your pardon most devoutly. And in no case will I harm you or your unborn child. I wish only to show you something.” Chaven put his hand into his pocket and produced a grayish object about the length of a child’s thumb. Now that he had moved into the light, Briony noticed for the first time that the physician’s clothes were ragged and dirty. She felt another stab of doubt.
Chaven held out the stone and both Anissa and her maid Seha shrank back as though it were the head of some poisonous serpent. “What is it?” Anissa pleaded.
“That is indeed the question,” said Chaven. “A question I have worked hard to answer. It has taken me to some strange places and to some strange folk in recent days, but I think I know. In the south it is called a kulikos. It is a kind of magical stone, most often found on the southern continent, but they occasionally make their way north to Eion—to the sorrow of many.”
“Don’t touch me with it!” Anissa shrieked, and although Briony was puzzled by what the physician was doing, she could not help feeling that her stepmother was reacting too strongly.
Chaven looked at Anissa sternly. “Ah, you know of such things, I see. But if you have done nothing wrong, madam, you have nothing to fear.”
“You are trying to bring a curse for my baby! The king’s child!”
“What is the point of this, Chaven?” Briony demanded. “She is about to give birth, after all. Why are you frightemng her?”
He nodded. “I will tell you, Briony . . . Highness. One of the workers on your brother’s tomb brought this stone to me because he thought it strange. I thought little of it at the time, I must sadly admit, but there have been many things on my mind since Kendrick’s death. I know I am not the only one.”
Briony glanced at the two women huddled on the edge of the bed. The chamber felt odd, as though a storm hung just above them, making the air prickle. “Go on, get to the point.”
“Something about this thing troubled me, though, and I began to wonder if it might be one of a certain class of objects mentioned in some of my older books. I discovered that the place it had been found was in a direct line between the outside window of a room near Kendrick’s chambers and the Tower of Spring—the tower in which we now find ourselves, a building almost completely given over to the residence of the king’s wife and her household.”
“He is talking in madness,” Anissa moaned. “Make him stop, Briony I am getting so frighted.”
The physician looked to her, but Briony’s heart was beating faster now and she wanted to hear the rest. “The windows of those chambers are all high above the ground,” she reminded him. “Brone searched them all. There was no rope left behind.”
“Yes.” The room was warm. Chaven was perspiring, his forehead glinting with sweat in the candlelight. “Which makes it all the stranger that I should find the mark of something having landed in the loose soil at the edge of the garden beneath that window. The marks were deep, so that even though many days had passed, they had not disappeared.”
Briony stared at him. “Wait a moment, Chaven. Are you suggesting that Anissa . . . a woman carrying a child, the king’s child . . . jumped out of the upstairs window? All the way to the edge of the garden? That she somehow killed Kendrick and his guards, then jumped down and escaped?” She took a breath, held out a hand as she prepared to have the guards arrest him. “That is truly madness.”
“Yes, make him go away,” Anissa wailed. “Briony, save me!”
“He is frightening my mistress, the queen,” cried Selia. “Why don’t the guards stop him?”
“It is certainly much like madness to believe such a thing, Highness,” Chaven agreed. He seemed very calm for a lunatic. “That is why I think you should hear all my tale before you try to understand. You see, I knew I could not make anyone believe a tale like that—I did not really believe it myself—but I was frightened and intrigued by what I had learned about kulikos stones. I decided I must know more. I went in search of knowledge, and eventually found it, although the price was high.” He paused and wiped at his forehead with his tattered sleeve. “Very high. But what I learned is that in the south of Eion they believe a kulikos stone summons a terrible spirit. So powerful is this ancient dark sorcery, so dreadful, that in many places even possessing one of these stones will earn the bearer death on the instant.”
Listening to such words by flickering candlelight, Briony felt as though she were in some story—not a tale of heroism and heavenly reward like the one Puzzle had just sung at the feast, but something far older and grimmer.
“Why do you say all this foolishness to my mistress when she is not wel
l?” demanded Selia in a shrill voice. “Even if someone has done some bad thing and then run past the tower where she lives, what is that to us? Why do you say that to her?”
The guards standing by the door were murmuring to each other now, confused and a little fearful. Briony knew she couldn’t let it all go on much longer. “State your case, Chaven,” she ordered.
“Very well,” he said. “I have learned that there is something interesting about the murderous kultkos spirit. It is female, always female When it is summoned, it only will inhabit the bodies of women.”
“Madness!” cried Anissa.
“And it is particularly a favorite weapon among the witches of Xand and of the southernmost lands of Eion Lands like Devonis.”
Anissa turned to her stepdaughter, holding out her hands. Briony couldn’t help shrinking back just a little. “Why do you let him say this to me, Briony? Have I not always been kind to you? Because I am from Devonis, I am a witch?”
“It is easy enough to discover,” Chaven said loudly. He thrust the small gray object closer to the king’s wife. “Here is the stone. Look at it. It was tossed aside by the one who employed it to murder the prince regent after she had used it up, but doubtless a little of those dark magicks still remain. Touch it, my lady, and if you have anything to hide, the stone will show that.” He extended his hand, bringing the stone close to her bare arm. Anissa tried to squirm away from it as though it were a hot coal, but couldn’t disentangle herself from the protective embrace of her maid Selia.
“No!” Selia snatched the milky-gray stone out of Chaven’s hand so quickly that as he closed his fingers on nothingness, the girl had already pulled it against her own breast. He stared in surprise. “There is no need for this,” the maid declared, then snapped out something in a language Briony did not recognize—a short, sharp cry like a hawk falling on its prey.
Briony tried to say something, to curse the young woman for interfering, but a change in the air of the room suddenly made it hard to talk, a cold filling and tightening of her ears as though she had dunked her head into the water.
“There is no need for this, or for anything else.” Seha’s voice suddenly seemed to come from a great distance. “I did not drop the stone away as a man drops away a maid when she is a maid no longer. I was weary and it fell from me, and when I was strong enough again to go back and search for it, it was gone.“ The girl’s voice rose, ending on a triumphant cry, harsh, but still muted by the strange squeezing of the air. “No one lets to drop a kuhkos stone, little man! Not by choice!” Selia lifted her hand and put the stone in her mouth.
Her face abruptly blurred and changed, her torchlit skin seeming to shrink away even as something darker unfolded from inside This devouring of light by darkness spread over her in the matter of a few heartbeats, as though someone had tossed a rock into a stream in which the girl was reflected, muddying the surface. The strangling air of the chamber finally began to move, but instead of bringing relief it sped faster and faster, a breeze that became a harsh wind, then a full gale, swirling so swiftly that Briony could feel needle-sharp bits of dust and flecks of stone stinging her skin. The guards shouted in surprise and terror but she could hear them only faintly.
The candles blew out Now only the fire gave light, and even the flames were bending toward the dark shape growing before the bed, the shape that had been the pretty maid Selia. Anissa screamed, a thin, threadlike sound. Briony tried to call to Chaven, but something had knocked the little man to the floor where he lay limply motionless, perhaps even dead. The room was filling with the mingled smells of hot metal and mud and blood—but blood most of all, powerful, heavy, and sour.
Strangely, Briony could still see something of Anissa’s maid in the horror, a thickness at its core that echoed her shape, a gleam of her features m the dark, crude mask, but mostly it was a blur of growth, an inconstant, shadowy thing armored like a crab or spider, but far more irregular and unnatural Jagged-edged plates and lengthening spikes of powdered stone and other hard things grew and solidified even as Briony gaped in astonishment, as if it built itself out of the very dust whirled through the chamber by the rushing air.
A glint of eyes from deep in the dark instability of the face, then the thing lifted an impossibly long hand. Scythelike claws clacked and rasped against each other as it advanced on Briony. She stumbled back, almost boneless with fear, knowing now beyond doubt what had killed her brother Kendrick. She was weaponless, wearing an impossible, ridiculous dress. She was doomed.
Briony grabbed up a heavy candleholder and swung it, but one of the thing’s clawed hands swept it from her grasp with a ringing clash Something rushed past her, a long pole crashed into the thing’s stomach and for a moment it was driven back.
“Run, Highness!” screamed the young guardsman Millward, trying to keep the thing pinioned on the end of his halberd like a boar. “Lew, help me!”
His fellow soldier was slow to come forward, by the time he did take a few timid steps into the blinding storm of grit, the thing had shattered Millward’s halberd like a stick of sugar candy and was free again. It closed with the second guard and dodged his swinging pike. Instead of running, Briony stared, transfixed. Why didn’t the guards draw their swords—who could be fool enough to fight with such long weapons in a small room. The apparition ripped at the second guard’s midsection with a dull flash of talons and he fell back, clutching at his shredded armor, gouting blood black as tar.
The thing now slouched between Briony and the door. Her moment of indecision had left her trapped. She thought she saw something moving behind the monstrous shape—was it Chaven escaping? The young guard Millward had finally drawn his sword, he swiped at the thing but it gave no ground, only let out a rumbling hiss, a sound more like stone scraping on stone than the breath of a living animal, and sank back on itself, its shadowy form became darker and thicker. For a heartbeat Briony thought she could see the maid Selia’s face in it, triumphant and deranged, lips curled back in a silent scream of joy.
The young guardsman leaped forward, shouting with terror even as he hacked at the shapeless thing. For a moment it seemed he might even be hurting it—the monstrosity had shrunk to almost human proportions and the claws spread like pleading hands, the dark face all moaning, toothless mouth. Then the talons darted out almost too quickly to be seen and Heryn Millward sagged and collapsed backward, blood bubbling from the hole of his eye socket, his face a red ruin.
Briony could barely breathe, her heart squeezed in her chest by terror until it was near to bursting. The kuhkos demon moved toward her, edges shifting, nothing quite clear except the gleam of its eyes and the clicking of the long, curved claws as they opened and closed, opened and closed. She stumbled and slid to the floor, fumbling desperately for a stool, anything to keep those terrible knives at bay. Her hand closed on something, but it was only the butt of dead Millward’s halberd, a length of splintered wood. She held it in front of her, knowing it would be no more use than a broomstraw against that strength and those terrible, hooked talons.
Then a blossom of flame rose in the air behind the thing, haloing it for a moment so that it seemed to have taken on a new aspect, no longer a dark, muddy nightmare but a fire demon from the pits of Kernios’ deepest realm. The fire crashed onto its murky head and shoulders in a shower of sparks and tumbling ribbons of flame. The creature let out a rasping howl of surprise that made Briony’s insides quiver as though they had been completely turned to liquid. It turned to lash out at Chaven, who jumped back, dropping the iron fire basket from his smoking, blackened hands, and somehow avoided being torn in half by the sweep of the talons. Flames leaped on the thing’s body and crowned its shapeless head, burning higher and higher until they licked at the ceiling. Stumbling backward, it pulled the curtains from the bed, tangling itself like a bear in a net. The diaphanous cloth sparked and swirled and now the flames were bound to it. The shadow-shape writhed, flapping its clawed hands, and Selia’s face came into view again, this t
ime twisted in a grimace of alarm. It tore at the flaming curtains and they began to fall away; in a moment it would be free again. Cold fury sent Briony forward with both hands wrapped around the broken halberd staff, which she drove as hard as she could into the center of the terrible thing. It was like running into a stone column— Briony flew back from the impact, dizzied—but the ragged hole of the thing’s mouth popped open and something flew out and clattered across the stone floor.
The kulikos beast howled again, this time in true pain and terror, but the air was suddenly full of sparks and flying dust. The wind that had swirled it into being now seemed to be pulling it apart.
Briony tried to get up, but the beast’s grating screech, so loud that it threatened to shake loose the roof timbers, made her stumble and fall again, and so the retaliatory sweep of claws missed her and she lived. The thing that had been Selia threw itself to the floor, moaning as it scrabbled after the lost kulikos stone. The crawling shape was wreathed in flame, but at its core the human and demon essences were in confusion now, flickering and rippling in smoke. It lurched up, hissing triumphantly, but the thing clutched in its taloned hand was only a thimble—perhaps one that had belonged to the maid herself. The shape dropped the silvery thing and took a lurching step backward with a bellow of pain and despair, the Selia-face now a visible mask of agony. Briony’s broken pikestaff shuddered in its chest, the wound a fiery hole. It stumbled back against the bed and the entire canopy finally pulled loose and fell atop it, a blanket of roaring fire. The shadow-shape roared and thrashed as the fire leaped upward, then, with a mewling noise that for the first time had something human in it, fell forward and lay stretched on the floor, twitching in the flames.