Shadowheart

by Tad Williams

  10

  Fools Lose the Game

  “For a year the poor child labored in the temple, but then the corrupt mantis of that place sold the Orphan and several other slaves to a ship’s captain in need of crew . . .”

  —from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

  THE ROOM WAS WARM AND DARK and smelled of the heart-shaped roots that one of Tolly’s other minions had set in the fireplace to smolder the night before, a smell that made Matt Tinwright’s head ache even as he peered around the chamber through slitted eyes. He still had no idea whether the roots had been meant for some magic ritual or simply so the smoke could provide a kind of dreamy drunkenness, which it had definitely done. Hendon Tolly’s pursuits, though often disquieting, were still largely mysterious, despite nearly a tennight of Tinwright being kept at the man’s side like a dog on a leash.

  He groaned and opened his eyes wider. The groan became a gasp of surprise as he saw that Tolly was sitting on the edge of the bed next to him, staring down like a vulture watching a living thing turn into carrion.

  “Wh—wha—what is it, my lord?” Tinwright stammered. “Do you need something?”

  They were alone in the chamber: the women had gone. Tinwright hoped they were all still well. He had seen a few frightening moments before he had finally collapsed into welcome oblivion.

  “Brother Okros never decided precisely what he wanted,” the lord protector said, as if in continuation of an early conversation. Perhaps it was: Tinwright could remember little of what had happened. He struggled into an upright position.

  “I beg your pardon, Lord Tolly?”

  “What he wanted. I’m talking of that pinchsniff Okros. Some days he played the man of learning, concerned only to uncover the great secrets of existence.” Tolly smirked. The lord protector looked remarkably well-groomed for a man who lived the way he did: Tinwright could not help wondering if the nobleman had snuck off to bathe while Tinwright himself was still sleeping. “It was quite amusing, really. On those occasions, he would treat me as a fine cook might treat his grossly fat master—as an embarrassment, but a necessary one, because I was the sponsor of his art.” Tolly rose and gestured impatiently. “Get up, poet. This will be a momentous day or I miss my guess.”

  “My lord . . . ?”

  “But Okros lost the path, you see. He came to believe that what we sought were the answers to his questions.” Tolly looked at Matt Tinwright with the bright eyes of a hunting hawk.

  The lord protector was stranger than usual, Tinwright thought—as though he were drunk, but in some hard, crystalline way. “But he was wrong, Lord . . . ?”

  “What I want had nothing to do with him. He was a fool . . . and fools lose the game.” Tolly smiled a hard smile. The warning was very clear. “Now come, poet.”

  Tinwright followed Hendon Tolly across the crowded residence to the Prince Kayne Library, which had become the lord protector’s throne room and council chamber during the days of the Qar siege. The old library had always been a quiet, neat room despite its large size, with books crowding all the shelves between the floors and the high ceilings, but now it looked as though it had been in the front lines of the siege. Books lay scattered everywhere, both modern bound volumes and parchment scrolls from Hierosol and even ancient Xis, as well as a dozen chairs and stools and even a few tables dragged in haphazardly from other parts of the residence. The disorder was in large part because Tolly and Brother Okros had emptied the Tower of Summer, King Olin’s refuge, and brought almost everything out of his locked room to this library—some of the books, Tinwright had noticed, even seemed to have been written by Olin himself, and he thought about how glorious it would be to be left alone long enough to read some of them. What a boon for a poet—to read the true thoughts of a mindful king! But Hendon Tolly was clearly not going to let him stray from his side long enough to do such a thing.

  Tinwright had not spoken to Elan or his mother in days, and had been hard-pressed even to send them a pair of short, secret letters telling them what had happened. He only prayed that his mother would not show up at the palace demanding that her newly elevated son—she must think he was Tolly’s secretary!—find a place for her in the residence.

  Nightmare. And not just the idea of having her underfoot—what if she mentioned Elan?

  Tinwright forced these thoughts from his head as a group of soldiers led by the lord constable, Berkan Hood, came to the library seeking an audience with Hendon Tolly. They were understandably distressed about the idea of the autarch’s ships landing unhindered in the harbor just opposite the castle.

  “Two dozen warships, Lord Protector, and there are still more coming!” Berkan Hood was doing his best to keep his voice even but not entirely succeeding; he was clearly not the kind of man who usually practiced such restraint. “Yet we have not fired so much as a single bombard. Please, my lord, why do we not fight back? We struggled against the fairies for months, threw them back a dozen times. Now that those demons have retreated, why have we gone shy as maidens in front of the Xixies, who are only mortal?”

  Hendon Tolly glared. He was barely interested in the trappings of ordinary rule—Tinwright had seen it even in their short time together. “There are plans afoot to protect this castle and this city, Hood,” he growled, “and I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.” With these curt words he dismissed them, although Berkan Hood and the others seemed far from satisfied.

  As they went out, the castellan, Tirnan Havemore, who had once been Avin Brone’s factor, slipped into the library. “It is here, my lord,” he said, handing Tolly a parchment chopped with a seal Tinwright had never seen. As his master read the letter, Havemore looked Tinwright up and down with unhidden dislike. None of the inner circle could understand why Tolly kept Matt Tinwright around, but that was unsurprising since Tinwright wasn’t certain himself.

  “I was wondering when we would hear from them,” the lord protector said when he had finished. He called for paper and ink to write a reply. “You’re the poet,” he told Tinwright. “Take my answer down and write it in a fair hand.”

  He proceeded to dictate a message so full of strange, almost meaningless phrases that Tinwright could only gape and do the best he could to get the wording correct. Still, a few things were clear. The astonishing missive was a letter to the Autarch of Xis, and promised that Tolly would meet with the southern king just after dark that very evening, then named the place.

  “M’Helan’s Rock?” Tinwright asked, surprised. “The island out in the bay?”

  “Yes, you insufferable idiot,” Tolly said. “Do you question my choice?”

  “No, my lord! I just wanted to make sure I had the name straight.”

  As if he were a child copying out texts in his best hand to avoid a thrashing, Matt Tinwright did his best to keep the writing clean and graceful. As if the Monster of Xis is going to notice my penmanship! he mocked himself. “Oh, no, we won’t kill that one when we conquer Southmarch—he writes too fair a hand!” Tolly’s right—I’m a fool. Still, it was an interesting situation, in a dreadful sort of way: who would have guessed a year and something past that Matt Tinwright would be here today, writing messages for the lord of all Southmarch to an actual god-king . . . whatever a god-king might be. . . .

  “Good.” Tolly finished reading, then added his own jagged signature and sealed the letter closed with wax and his signet ring. “Send it back immediately,” he instructed Tirnan Havemore. “And if any man tries to open that, I will make sure he chokes on his own severed fingers.”

  The castellan hurried off with the letter held out as though it were a deadly serpent.

  “So now the endgame begins,” said Tolly as he turned to Matt Tinwright. “Our lives and our destinies are in our own hands, poet. Who could ask for better than that? If we succeed, we win all. If we lose—well, history will not remember our names and future generations will not find our graves.” He grinned, his ex
pression still as shiny and brittle as cracked glass. “Splendid, eh?”

  Tinwright only bowed and said, “My lord.” Tolly’s ranting did not seem to require an answer and he was too terrified to try to invent one.

  Not all the Qar who had met in the small cavern near Sandsilver’s Dancing Room had their minds on the new enemy, the thousands of Xixian soldiers and their master, the autarch. Hammerfoot, lord of the Ettins, who like all his kind was slow to build to wrath but even slower to cool, sat in the darkness fuming like one of the forges of Firstdeeps.

  “They humiliate us,” he rumbled. “These sunlanders. A thousand years of wretched treatment, hundreds of years of exile, and we are expected to forgive them ... just so.” He flicked his massive, blunt fingers in a gesture of disgusted finality. “As I sat looking at their unformed faces, soft as pink mud, it was all I could do not to crush them. I should have crushed them ...”

  “Then you would be a fool,” Yasammez told him. “We need them all.”

  “Need them?” Hammerfoot looked up; in the small place, he seemed to grow even larger. “We could have ground them all beneath our hooves if you had not held us back, Lady.”

  Yasammez stood, and her dozen lieutenants fell silent. “Do you see this?” she said, touching the Seal of War. “It means you have sworn yourself to me. Do you see this sword?” She slapped Whitefire’s sheath. “In the very place my kin were murdered I forswore my oath and sheathed it. And you tell me now that you would become twice an oathbreaker? Where is the honor of the Deep Born, Hammerfoot? Where is the brave heart that has shared so many troubles with me—and whose father and grandfather fought beside me as well?” She shook her head and the thoughts that carried her words were as chill as a blast of wintry wind. “I am disappointed.”

  For a moment it seemed the anger might make the great Ettin do something beyond madness, for the oaths of the Deep Born were among the most powerful things that any of those gathered there knew. Even Lord Hammerfoot, though, could not stand long in Lady Porcupine’s cold regard.

  “I . . . I spoke rashly,” he said. “But I do not understand what we are doing, my mistress. We came here to fight the creatures who have done evil to us . . . not to help them.”

  “We cannot beat this southern king by ourselves,” said Yasammez. “I told you, this autarch has twenty soldiers for every one of ours, and other weapons beside—those are odds that even the People cannot overcome . . . unless all we seek here is a noble death.” She spread her hands in the gesture Complications Unsought as she seated herself again. “But though we need the sunlanders as allies, that does not mean they are friends. Ultimately, we must keep the doorway to the gods from falling under the power of any mortals, even our momentary allies, so if we defeat the southerner but still cannot regain control here ...” She shrugged. “Then it will be time for the other measures.”

  Aesi’uah, her chief eremite, seemed unsettled by this idea. “Other measures? Do you mean the Fever Egg . . . ?”

  “Yes,” said the dark lady, silencing her. “Stone of the Unwilling, which of your people has been tasked with protecting the Egg?”

  He flickered as if surprised. “Shadow’s Cauldron, great lady.”

  “Call her.”

  “Of course. She will step to us now.”

  A moment later another of the Guard of Elementals joined their presence, smelling freshly of the Void. “I have come ...” she began.

  “Produce it,” commanded Yasammez.

  Shadow’s Cauldron did not need to ask what she was expected to produce; only half an instant passed before it was in her hand, a translucent stone the size of a human child’s head. In its depths some brown murkiness so dark it was almost black swirled like a tiny thundercloud. Inside that cloud something shone a sickly yellow, like lightning struggling to be born.

  “The Egg is strong.” Shadow’s Cauldron was young and less used to forming words than Stone of the Unwilling; her speech buzzed like wasps in the thoughts of those listening. “It will not break unless thrown from a great height, or struck by something heavy and strong. But when it is broken, the fever seed will be released and it will spread like smoke. Everything in its path will die.”

  “Even a god?” Yasammez looked at the thing with interest and a little distaste.

  Again the buzzing words; those who had skin felt it crawl in response. “Any earthly form that a god wears will die—nothing that draws breath or sinks roots can live when this fever burns it.”

  “But what will stop it?” demanded Greenjay’s son, Flightless. “Shall we kill everything that runs beneath the sun or moon? That will be a miserable epitaph for the People.”

  “It stops of its own accord, like the ripples in a large pond,” Shadow’s Cauldron told him with something like anger in her voice. “As the Lady Yasammez wishes, it will not spread far beyond the borders of this mortal land before its potency dies.” Her flicker grew stronger. “Although many believe that none of the sunlanders deserve to survive ...”

  “Thank you, daughter,” said Stone of the Unwilling. “Have you heard what you wished to hear, Lady Yasammez?”

  “She may go.”

  A moment later, Shadow’s Cauldron and the Egg were no longer in the cavern. It was the eremite Aesi’uah who broke the silence. “Has it really come to this, Mistress? To such despair? Not only to take our own lives, and thousands upon thousands of mortal lives as well, but even the lives of beast and herb, then to make this place a wasteland of death for years to come?”

  “Small enough price for them to pay for their treachery, certainly!” said one of the Changing tribe. “We are owed this vengeance, Dreamless! As Shadow’s Cauldron said, it is a shame we cannot kill more.”

  Yasammez silenced him with a harsh gesture. “We do nothing simply for vengeance, much as it might be deserved. But know that I will do whatever I must to make certain that the gods and their gateway do not fall under the control of any mortal.”

  “Are you not putting your own wisdom above that of the god himself?” Aesi’uah protested. “Why should Crooked himself not decide what is right to do?”

  “Because the god is dying,” Yasammez said coldly. She did not like being questioned by her own eremite, however long and honorably the half-Dreamless had served her. “He is scarcely still there—certainly his thoughts have been strange for some time. It could be he is trapped in nightmare and will no longer even be able to understand us. No, we must not rely on even the god . . . on my father . . . to make our decisions. The People must choose their own way forward.”

  “But ...” Aesi’uah was searching for words, her own thoughts clearly complicated. “But I fear for them, my lady.”

  “For whom?”

  “Our allies, the mortals—the sunlanders. I find it harder to hate them now. They are . . . different than I expected.”

  “Think you so?” asked Yasammez with no small amount of scorn. “They are exactly as I expected. Exactly.”

  The boat with Hendon Tolly, Matt Tinwright, and two of the lord protector’s guards landed at M’Helan’s Rock first. While Hendon Tolly and Tinwright climbed carefully up the ancient dock stairs, the boat with the other four guards tied up and began to unload. Tinwright paused on the steps to look out across the rocky island and the lights of the castle just across the water, overwhelmed with fear and wonder.

  It was plain to see why Tolly had chosen the spot: it was accessible from the mainland but far enough from both the shore and the castle that even in daylight an observer would have had trouble seeing who landed there. And the rock itself was so craggy and studded with caves and inlets that Tinwright thought three or four different ships might land on the island and never see each other.

  The lodge at the top of the hill smelled musty when they opened the great doors, and little surprise: Hendon Tolly said no one had used it since he had taken power. Tolly complained about the lack of amenities and having to wait in the cold and damp while one of his guards lit a fire in the great room—e
ven now, in late spring, the island was a windy, wet place. All the guards were well armed, some carrying swords and spears, others with loaded crossbows.

  “He will be here soon.” Tolly settled into a high-backed chair. “Oh, yes—he will have been watching us land, to make certain we brought only six guards and no more, as we agreed.”

  Something made a skittering noise in the ceiling and Tinwright looked up.

  “Rats,” said Hendon Tolly. “The place has been empty so long that it must be full of them. Do you fear rats, poet?”

  “Fear them?” He didn’t like them much, but he also wasn’t certain what Tolly wanted him to say. “Not too much ...”

  “They are the cleverest of cattle, as the country folk say.” Hendon Tolly grinned. “I knew a man once, a keeper in our hunting lodge in the Summerfield hills, who raised one almost like his own child. It would sit upon his shoulder, and when he commanded it to, it would sing.”

  “Sing?” The noise of someone shouting down on the dock wafted through the unshuttered windows.

  “Well, as much as a rat can,” Tolly conceded. “It would squeak along when he sang. And it could fetch him his purse if he dropped it, or find coins in the straw under a table. Then somebody tired of the trick and stepped on the creature.” He tilted his head. “Ah, do you hear? He is coming.” The lord protector stood, which was a surprise in itself, but as Tinwright watched him shifting from foot to foot, he realized something even stranger: Hendon Tolly was worried, perhaps even frightened.

  One of the Summerfield guards opened the door and let in two dark, hard-faced men carrying long, ornamented rifles and wearing helmets in the shape of some grinning, spotted cat, a lion or a pard. After a moment’s wary inspection of the room, they stepped to either side of the door and stood at rigid attention. Before Tinwright had time to do more than gawk at these newcomers with their hard, brown faces, a third figure followed them through, a portly, older man with a long and carefully tended beard and an air of almost ludicrous gravity.