by Tad Williams
And then, just when it seemed that the Qar could do nothing but flee or surrender, a figure on a great gray horse appeared in the road as if it had stepped out of nowhere. The fairy folk collapsed into a semicircle around this armored warrior, who although nowhere near as large as the club-wielding giant still seemed tall beyond mortal men. His armor was a dull, leaden color, his face a sooty black—not black like the skin of Shaso or Dawet or the other southerners Briony had met, but black as something burned, black as charcoal or a fireplace poker. The creature’s eyes, though, were like nothing Briony had ever seen, lambent yellow as amber held before a flame, and he carried a weapon that had an exotic blade on one side and a spike on the other, clearly meant to pierce armor—even more frightening when Briony contrasted it with the light mail Prince Eneas was wearing.
To his credit, Eneas did not hesitate, but spurred toward the newcomer, recognizing that the Qar were rallying around him and a victory over the fairies that had seemed so certain a few moments ago now seemed much less so. A rain of arrows came from the hill above; Eneas’ men screamed in outrage at the human mercenaries who had fired them, because as many of them seemed to strike the Syannese as the enemy Qar.
The black-faced creature spurred toward Eneas, swinging his ax in violent circles above his head.
“Akutrir!” the other Qar chanted—the creature’s name, Briony guessed. “Akutrir saruu!”
Eneas and the fairy lord met in the center of the road, scattering both men and Qar who leaped for safety like grasshoppers disturbed in a summer field. The spike on the fairy’s ax bit into Eneas’ shield, piercing the painted white hound, and for long moments the two could not separate, Eneas struggling to pull back his shield and hacking at the handle of Akutrir’s weapon with his own sword. The fairy’s grinning mouth was huge—his dark-shadowed face seemed nothing but teeth and glowing orange eyes, like a Kerneia mask. The newness of everything that had distracted Briony was now gone; she was nothing but frightened. This was not an old story or a tale from the Book of the Trigon. Even though she was praying to Zoria as hard as she could and to the Trigonate Brothers as well, the gods would not step in and save them. They could all die here by the side of this lonely road, slaughtered by the enemy Qar.
What had seemed at first like single combat was nothing of the sort—the fairy folk around Eneas jabbed at him with short spears even as he met Akutrir’s blows with sword swipes of his own. The prince’s men charged forward to even the odds and everything disappeared into the swirl of flashing blades and dust from the road, which now hung over everything, a gray cloud sparkling in the morning sunlight.
And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun. The tall fairy lord retreated and the rest of the Qar fled away toward the east as the mortals who had been fighting a losing battle for their lives only an hour before shouted and cheered. Some of them even hurried down to chase the retreating Qar, but the fairy folk seemed almost to melt away into the trees at the end of the valley.
The merchants and their mercenary soldiers might have been celebrating, but the Temple Dogs had lost more than a few men and were in no such mood themselves. Their grim faces as they brought back the bodies made Briony want to turn away. Instead, she forced herself to stand and watch the corpses being carried off the field to be laid beside the road. A detachment of the prince’s soldiers began to dig the necessary graves.
Now these Syannese men have died for my cause, too, she told herself. Eneas’ comrades and brothers. That is a debt that cannot be forgotten.
8
And All His Little Fishes
“... And so they entered into the great city of Hierosol. Along the way Adis was taught to pretend injury to excite the pity of wealthy folk, and other beggar’s tricks, so that he could earn his keep ...”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
BARRICK AWOKE IN HIS CHAMBER at Qul-na-Qar to find another meal waiting for him, just as good as the first—slices of some fruit crunchy as apples but tangy as a Kracian norrange, and thick brown bread that tasted a little of mulled wine, along with plenty of butter in a small pot. It seemed clear that some of the people who lived in the castle must still bake, and some kept cows or goats. At least Barrick hoped it was cows or goats supplying the butter and cheese, but if some other creature was responsible, he was just as happy not knowing because it all tasted good.
Barrick swallowed the last of the small loaf, then wiped the butter pot with his fingers and licked them clean. Gods, but it felt wonderful to have something in his stomach—real food, too, not bitter herbs or even the scrawny black squirrels he’d been hunting since crossing the Shadowline, miserable, tasteless things that in his hunger and misery had seemed a festival meal.
Harsar appeared a moment later, as though the little lop-eared servant had been in the hallway listening for the sound of Barrick sucking on his fingers. “She is waiting for you in the Chamber of the Gate of Sleep,” he said in his clumsily accented speech. Barrick wondered why the little servant didn’t just speak to him in thoughts as the queen did. “I will take you there.”
“Where?” But even as he said it he knew, as if it had been in his memory all along—the many-columned chamber with the shining disk where he had first arrived in Qul-na-Qar from the city of Sleep. His heart quickened. Saqri had been telling the truth, then. She had an idea.
The first thing that surprised him when he reached the columned room was that the queen was kneeling in the center of the glowing, pearly stone disk with her head bowed as if she prayed. The second was that when she rose and beckoned Barrick forward, Harsar stepped toward her as well.
“No, you must stay, Harsar-so-a,” she told the hairless creature. “After all, the castle will need to be looked after in our absence, and there is no one who knows it better than you. Your sons will need you, too.”
He bowed, showing no emotion. “As you say, my lady.” He turned and went from the room, quick and silent as a shadow sliding on the wall.
“Very well, then.” She turned to Barrick. “Two kinds of roads there are, as I told you. The first sort are those that Crooked himself created, or at least made available. We have one such road here before us.” She gestured to the gleaming disk. “Through it, you can pass into the city of Sleep ...”
“But that won’t do us any good . . . !”
“Just so.” She gave him a cold look, and he shut his mouth. “But there are other roads, other paths, and many of those the gods themselves found, although they did not know what they were or how to find or make more. They used them as a snake takes the burrow of a mouse for his own, although he did none of the work of digging. And just like a snake, sometimes the gods devoured or destroyed the roads’ original owners, spirits of an earlier age—but that is another tale. In any case, there are still several such roads leading to the houses of the great gods like Kernios and his brothers.
“Although it leads to the very place we seek, the road into Kernios’ house is banned to us because we have the smell of Qul-na-Qar on us, the house of the Earthlord’s enemies.” She turned to Barrick. “But there is one other god who might open a road for us. Long has your family believed itself descended from the great sea lord Erivor, brother of Perin and Kernios ...”
“Is that true, then . . . ?” said Barrick, amazed.
“Not in the least,” the queen told him. “Or at least not in my knowledge. Anglin’s folk were fishermen, but they were also good fighters, and gained their thrones by wit and strength. No gods had a hand in it—at least not directly.” Did she smile? “But long has your house held Erivor your special patron, and many sacrifices and festivals have you given in his honor, century upon century. It could be that he would listen to you, not because you have the blood of Crooked in you, but because you are an Eddon, and the Eddons have long and richly worshiped him.”
Barrick’s head felt as though it were spinning. “But . . . but you said he was asleep!”
“The sleep of gods is not like the sleep of others,” she explained. “And in all the time your family has prayed to him and sacrificed to him, he has always been sleeping, for a thousand years and more.” Now she did smile, the smallest stitch taking up the corner of her mouth. “So pray, Barrick of the Eddon. Down upon your knees and pray to your old tribal god. Ask him to open a way for us.”
Was she mocking him?
“Kneel?”
She nodded. “It helps one’s perspective. Treating with the gods requires courtesy, and courtesy is ultimately an acknowledgment of power—the true power on both sides of the conversation.”
“But I have no power at all!”
Saqri did not bother to agree with this.
Barrick lowered himself to his knees. He could not help noticing how much easier it was now that his arm no longer pained him, and how much more comfortable it was now that the bruises and bloody scrapes of the journey were beginning to heal.
Ask him . . . someone said quietly in his head; he couldn’t guess whether it was Saqri or one of the bodiless voices. Ask the sea lord . . . to open the way . . .
Barrick closed his eyes, uncertain of what to do. He had prayed countless times, especially in his childhood—oh, how he had prayed for the nightmares to stop, for his arm to be healed, to be able to play like the others—but never with such an unusual request in mind. He tried to remember some of the rituals held on Father Erivor’s sacred days, but with little success.
Father Erivor . . . that was what Barrick’s own father had called him, almost as a joke. “Father Erivor and all his little fishes preserve us!” the king would growl when he was particularly exasperated with one of his children.
Why did you leave me to suffer alone, Father? Why? It was bad enough what Olin had done, throwing his son down the steep tower steps, but why had he spoken so little of it afterward? Shame? Or because he was too busy with his own problems and the problems of the realm?
Father Erivor. Barrick tried to remember what he had thought then, as a child, when that name still meant somebody real—not just the bearded, blue-green giant portrayed on the chapel wall, silver fish surrounding his head like the rays of the morning sun, but the shape he saw in his head when they bowed their heads together and Father Timoid led them in prayers to the family patron.
Great Erivor, monarch of the green-lit depths . . .
As a child Barrick had imagined the god moving slowly at the bottom of the sea, slow as the great turtles or the ancient pike that lived in the castle ponds, wrapped in waving fronds of kelp.
Great Erivor, who has blessed us beyond other men . . .
It was strange, but Barrick could no longer tell if his eyes were closed or open. He seemed to hear the wind battering the waves to froth.
Great Erivor, who calms the waves and brings his bounty to our nets, who rides the great whalefish and tames the world-girdling serpent, hear us now!
The darkness swirled. The darkness was shot through with green light and flittering, bright shapes.
Great Erivor, who slew many-armed Xyllos and drove vast Kelonesos back into
the depths so he would prey no more on sailors!
Erivor, who quiets the storm! Erivor, lord of ocean winds!
Chieftain of all sunken gold! Master of treasure!
King of the world’s waters! Traveler’s rescue!
Hear me now!
The darkness grew deeper, greener, and even more quiet. The winds that had howled in Barrick’s ears only moments before were muffled, and even the waves themselves became only a distant roiling. Down here all was silent, the sediments ancient, the kelp coiling and uncoiling, fish darting through its strands. Here dark things swam and crawled. Here mighty armored shapes moved through the dim, greenshot day and the lightless night.
Erivor? Barrick tried to send his thoughts out as boldly as he could. My family has always given you what was due. You have been our patron, our lord. Please, lord, help me now!
Something in the darkness shifted—nothing he could see, but something he could feel, as if the massy ocean floor itself had shrugged. It was so near—and so huge! The sheer size of what he felt terrified him, and for a moment Barrick Eddon almost flung himself away from the thing that frightened him, away from the darkest deeps and up toward the light. Then he remembered what would happen if he failed.
My lord! Hear me! Open the road for me to your house. Open the door! If you ever loved us, now is the time to help us! Please, Father Erivor!
And then he felt . . . something. It reached out to him and touched his thoughts, mossy and gigantic as a mountain. He could feel the immense slumbering impossibility of it, this thing sunk deep in millennia of sediment, slow as a starfish moving across a rock but also with parts of its thought as swift as tiny fish dodging in and out of the safety of coral fronds.
Manchild . . . ?
The thought was ageless, ponderous and strange, as though the lord of the sea truly were a giant turtle or lobster, something immense buried in the muck for thousands of years, its shell covered in countless other, smaller living things, waiting for who knew what distant happenstance.
Will you open the door for me, Father Erivor?
It could barely hear him, barely sense him at all. It was not entirely asleep, but it certainly was not awake—he could feel the greater part of its thought lying beyond his reach, inert, dreaming, moving at a rate so slow that no living thing could understand it. Door . . . ?
The door to your house! Open it for me! A thought occurred to him, floating in like a bubble. I will make you many sacrifices, I promise!
The door . . . it said again, and then he could feel the immense thing suddenly very near—a bright eye in the darkness, a mouth that might have been a hole into the heart of the world, a lightless whirlpool. It was so much bigger—it was big as the world . . . !
Little worshiper . . . you . . . may . . . pass.
The darkness fell away and Barrick fell with it. For a moment all was as it had been when he traveled through Crooked’s Hall out of Sleep. Then pressure and cold smashed in on him, crushing him almost to nothingness. Terrified, he opened his mouth to scream, and it filled with salty water.
Father Erivor had opened the door to his house, but his house was at the bottom of the sea.
Barrick was deep, deep in green water—only the gods knew how deep. He’d swallowed more than a little of it in his initial shock, a stinging mouthful that burned in his throat and windpipe until all he wanted to do was cough, which he knew would doom him. He clenched his teeth against it, flailing against the cold water, but he did not even know which way was up. He opened his eyes to the caustic green and saw bubbles streaming and circling him like dandelion fluff. The Fireflower chorus in his head was shrieking a warning but it seemed muffled, distant. He watched the bubbles swirl even as the water began to grow dark—as if here, deep beneath the ocean, twilight had fallen. It was beautiful in a strange way. . . .
Even as Barrick realized he was dying, that the breath trapped in his lungs was turning to hot poison, he saw that the bubbles were forming actual shapes, shapes ghostly as mist that circled him, watching. Did he see pity on those spectral, frothy faces, or only curiosity?
The god’s children, his thoughts told him, but they were not exactly his own thoughts.
Something clasped his arm and drew him out of the cloud of bubbles into shadowed green emptiness. Floating, he could not resist, but everything around him was turning black and he did not really care to resist anyway. Was he rising? No, sinking . . .
Her face loomed close to his, smooth and pale, hard as a statue, green as southern jade. For a dreamlike instant he thought it was his own mother’s face—Meriel, the mother he had never seen, who had died birthing him. The apparition held her hand up before him and caught a bubble the size of a duck’s egg; when it touched her slim fingers, it began to grow until it had become as big as a rubyskin melon. He could scarcely see it, but felt it press against his face, cool and de
licate as a first kiss. New air pushed into his chest, replacing the water that had been choking him, and suddenly the darkness was crossed with streaks of light as his thoughts stirred back into life once more.
Do nothing, manchild—only breathe. Saqri’s voice was distant at first, but by the last words it filled his mind. We must give thanks to the god, even if he only sleeps and dreams us. Even more so, in fact, if he only dreams us. . . .
Barrick had no idea what she meant. He was content to float and taste the sweetness of air while all around him the green seemed to grow deeper and wider until he thought he could see shadowy shapes on all sides, pillars and arches. He couldn’t tell if they were natural or the work of some supernatural hand—in fact, he could not be entirely certain he was even seeing them.
But behind the vertical shadows was one deeper and darker than all the rest—a cave? A hall? For a moment, as a little light streamed down through the green from above—and as he realized for the first time where “up” actually was—he thought he could make out a massive shape crouched deep in that darkness, something so big and so strange that he could barely steel himself to face in its direction, let alone look carefully.
Tell him, she said.
Tell him what? Despite the bubble of air over his face, diminished in size now but still filling his lungs with life, he was finding it hard to take a breath. Something was in that cave, something unimaginably huge and powerful and alive, and he was terrif ied . . .
Tell him!
I . . . we . . . thank you. Thank you, Lord Erivor. By . . . He could remember nothing—all those bored mornings sitting in the chapel, and how could he have ever guessed this hour would come? Why hadn’t he paid better attention? By the blood of . . . of my ancestors, who have always served you, O Lord, and upon whom you have showered your blessings . . . No! That was wrong! That was the harvest prayer to Erilo!