Shadowheart

by Tad Williams

  She found a little hill overlooking the camp and in sight of the sentries, then set off to climb it. The day was gray, but patches of sunny sky slid by overhead, and the way up was just difficult enough to engage her mind. By the time she reached the top about midday, she felt better. Still, she dared not think about her father too much. To have been so close to him after all this time, and then to lose him again . . . !

  Prince Eneas and his captains were planning swift, unexpected raids to harry Sulepis’ mainland troops, and to prevent supplies from reaching the autarch’s army. This last was largely pointless as long as the autarch still controlled Brenn’s Bay, but at the very least Eneas meant to make the autarch aware that he had enemies behind him as well as in front of him.

  But although Briony didn’t really expect the Syannese prince and his troops to do anything else, she could not escape the bitter idea of her father being taken away into the depths. But why should he be taken down into the tunnels under the castle? What lunacy did the southern king have planned?

  Her father had also told her that his old, bad feelings were coming back to him as he returned to the castle. Perhaps that had something to do with why the autarch had brought him here. And gods? Her father had said something about gods, too, and Midsummer’s Night, which was far less than a tennight away.

  If only I had a longer time to talk with him. If only I could see him again, embrace him again . . . The tears were coming back.

  Briony pulled out Lisiya’s charm and turned it over and over in her hand, trying to find some kind of peace. So many questions, and none of them likely to be answered soon, or at all. And meanwhile, the sun slid by overhead, in and out of the clouds, on its remorseless passage toward Midsummer’s Day.

  Despite her climb, she lay awake for a long time that night listening to the soldiers talking and singing quietly and playing dice. The scouts the autarch had sent out to search for the raiders had long since returned to their encampment along Brenn’s Bay, so the men were enjoying the relative security.

  Briony was still clutching the charm in her fist. Please, dear Lisiya, she prayed, help me to sleep. I feel like I will go mad if I do not get to sleep tonight! But when sleep came at last in the deep watches of the night, Briony did not immediately recognize it for what it was....

  She was walking through what had once been a forest, something deep and green and quiet—but that had been before the fire. Now it was a scorched wasteland, pocked with the blackened remains of trees both standing and fallen, the grasses and undergrowth burned away, even the earth itself blackened. It was hard to tell what time of day it was because of the pall of smoke that lay over her and made the gray, hot sky seem shallow as a bowl. Smaller wisps still rose from the ground, as though the flames had stopped burning only a short while before.

  It was as she crunched through the burned stubble that she realized she was still holding Lisiya’s charm tight against her breast.

  Briony found the demigoddess at the base of what had been a great silver oak tree, but was now little more than a tortured sculpture made of charcoal. Lisiya was leaning on a staff, frail and gray as a dandelion puff. She looked half her previous size, as though the hot winds had leached all the moisture from her, leaving only skin and bones.

  “Somebody is angry at me,” she said with a weary grin.

  “Who did this?” Briony asked. The demigoddess looked so delicate that she almost didn’t dare approach her.

  “I cannot say. I am being watched.” Lisiya lifted a clawlike hand. “The sky itself listens.”

  “Is this because of me?” Briony asked, sinking to her knees on the scorched earth. “Because you helped me?”

  “Possibly.” Lisiya shrugged. The demigoddess had previously seemed inexhaustible, but now moved as though she was afraid any effort might snap her brittle bones. “It does not do to speculate, child. The gods are asleep and that makes it hard to understand them, or even to recognize them . . .”

  Briony didn’t understand. “Is there something I can do to help you?”

  The specter of a smile crept across the gaunt, wrinkled face. “Listen. I will tell you what I can. I am . . . limited, though.” She sagged a little, then pulled herself upright on her staff again. “The hour is coming. It is almost here. The hour when the world we know will end.”

  “But . . . do you mean it’s too late?”

  “It is too late to turn things back to the way they once were,” Lisiya said. “It is too late for the world that was. What kind of world will come—that you may yet be able to influence.”

  “Influence? How?”

  “That is not for me to say. But you have only a little time.”

  “Do you mean Midsummer Night? My father said . . .”

  “Men call it Midsummer, but here in the place of the gods and their dreams, it marks the moment when the sun begins to die. And every year since time itself began, since Rud the Daystar first mounted the firmament, the battle rages. Mortal men celebrate Midsummer as if it is a victory, but it has always been the opposite—the moment when the sun, when light itself, begins to lose its battle. It is an ill-omened day.” She shook her head.

  “But what can we do? It’s almost upon us!”

  Now the frustration showed on Lisiya’s bony face. “I do not know! I am only a small thing, when it comes to it—a servant, an errandrunner—and I am out of my depths. But I called to you, or you called to me, so there must be something I can give you, some word . . .” The old woman closed her eyes, making Briony wonder what was happening: Lisiya seemed so tired she could barely breathe, swaying in place like a long stalk of grass. At last, she opened her eyes.

  “Omphalos,” the demigoddess said faintly. “Look for the omphalos, that which connects the past to the womb and the womb to the future—that which is the center of the spinning universe.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Lisiya waved her clawlike hand. “I have told you what I can!” she said angrily. “Even now my words have attracted attention.”

  “But I don’t understand . . . !”

  “You must, because there is nothing else I can . . .” She broke off suddenly as red light flickered across the sky, flaring like blood against the gray smoke. “Go,” Lisiya said. “There is nothing more I can do. Farewell, Briony Eddon. If you survive, build me a shrine!”

  Briony tried to ask her another question, but thunder was rattling the burned trees and making the parched ground shudder, and the harsh red light seemed to be growing by the moment.

  Fire, Briony realized. The fire is coming back . . . !

  And then the sky exploded with bloody, glaring scarlet, so bright and hot that Briony screamed in terror and woke up panting in her tent in the Syannese camp, her fist pressed hard against her breast. When she opened her hand, she saw the charm was blackened and shriveled as if it had been burned.

  Barrick did not speak a word as he walked to Saqri’s tent. Hundreds of eyes watched him crossing the great chamber, and all of them must have seen the blood-red stone dangling from his hand. Others, more familiar with mortals, might have recognized the expression of surprise and growing wonder on his face.

  She gave it to me, he marveled. I told the oldest, strongest woman in the world that she was wrong, and so she resigned the leadership of the Qar armies.

  But was it really as simple and straightforward as that? Something about the exchange still troubled him, although at the moment he was too stunned to ponder it much.

  The guards did not lift a hand to stop him as he walked past them into Saqri’s tent. She looked up from a silent conversation with two fairy creatures he did not recognize. Her eyes widened a fraction when she saw what dangled from his hand.

  “I felt her, but I did not know what I was feeling,” was all she said. “Is that for me or for you?”

  Barrick laughed. It had not even occurred to him that he might keep it himself. He did not understand enough—he might never understand enough. “For you. And then you mu
st decide what your people are going to do.”

  “We will fight, of course,” she said, reaching out with slim fingers and letting the gem nestle in her hand. “Crooked was my grandfather’s longest grandfather, as we say—the father of the Fireflower. We cannot let him be used by this mad king. If the Long Defeat finally claims our kind, most of us will embrace it, for who would want to live in a world without the beauty of accident?” She stood looking down at the gem for a moment, then carefully lifted the chain over her dark hair and let the Seal of War rest on her white breastplate.

  “Call them all from their camps—water children, air children, and all of the People who follow the Seal of War. Tell them we are making last choices now. The end of the Godwar has come.”

  And so the Qar and their ancient allies, Rooftoppers and Skimmers, came from all the places they had been waiting and met in a great cavern near the Funderling temple, a wide, low-roofed chamber filled with limestone columns. Saqri sat beside a small, shallow pool in the middle of the cavern and all the others ranged themselves around it like the knights of Lander’s famous court, except instead of a table they gathered around a liquid mirror which reflected the lights of their torches and lanterns. Upsteeplebat’s people stood in their miniature lines near Saqri, with headman Turley and his Skimmers beside them. The leaders of the Qar seated themselves around the rest of the pond, their peoples crowded in behind them. Even the chief eremite Aesi’uah, the woman with the dark eyes, was there. Only Yasammez herself was absent. It was strange for Barrick to think of Lady Porcupine wandering alone and bitter somewhere beneath his old home, but he thought he understood her. She was not the type to surrender, but she had done so. She would not want to watch decisions being made without her.

  “Once we were one people!” Saqri’s voice sounded as hard and sweet as the ring of a stone temple bell. “Once we were one song. Now we are dozens of different melodies, but today we join together to bring our songs into harmony once more. The Children of Black Earth—the Funderlings, as they are named here—have gone before us to fight the enemy, but to us they are drows and they have always been family, however estranged. The Skimmers are here with us. We call them Ocean’s Children, and although some have tried to make them follow this leader or that over the centuries, like the ocean they have remained free. We are proud they return to fight alongside us.

  “And Thunder’s Children, who are the smallest of all, except in courage. Their kindred, the Tine Fay, live on in the shadowlands, some in the wilds, some in the towns and cities. Perhaps one day you will be reunited with them. Perhaps not. Nothing is easy to see or understand this close to the collapse of things.

  “And we will fight beside humans, too, those we once called ‘stone apes’ before we learned to respect their strength and fear their intolerance. I would not be alive today without them. Barrick Eddon, the heir to this castle’s throne, brought me back the essence of my life, and he also stands with us in this fight. If there was any doubt about the days we live in they will be answered when I tell you that the Fireflower now blooms in his veins. Yes, think on that—the king my husband is dead, but his essence, and that of all his predecessors, is alive in the blood of a mortal man.”

  A flock of whispers came from the gathered Qar, and many turned to stare at Barrick, eyes of almost every imaginable shape and size widening as they gazed at him.

  “Mortal men also fight along with the Funderlings below us,” Saqri continued, “and thousands more have fought and died in the castle above, protecting the god who saved us all, though they did not know what they did or what it meant. Nevertheless, all debts will be paid by this last battle,” Saqri declared. “Whether we succeed or fail, live or die, our invasion of mortal lands is over.”

  Somewhere Lady Yasammez heard that, and the clutch of anger and sorrow that came back, the feeling of being forced into dishonor, was so strong in his thoughts that Barrick almost fell over.

  “Now we must plan,” Saqri said. “The ritual this autarch wants to perform in the Last Hour of the Ancestor must take place at Midsummer, and that is only days away. If we can somehow help the Funderlings to hold him back, he will miss his opportunity, and then have to hold his gains for a year before he can try again. Anything might happen in that time. Make no mistake—his army is vast and fierce, and he will sacrifice them to the last man if necessary to reach his goal, because once he has the powers of Heaven at his command he will no longer need an army. He will be unvanquishable.”

  Only days, Barrick thought, looking around the cavern. Even counting those who were invisible in the shadows, they had only a few hundred fighters and not much more than a thousand Qar all together. Aesi’uah had told them that the Funderlings numbered perhaps two thousand, but likely much fewer.

  “We will make our numbers felt,” said Saqri as if she had heard his thoughts. “But not down here—not at first. To make ourselves feared by the men in the earth, we must first strike in the open air. The southerners are used to seeing their own soldiers disappear into the tunnels. They will not be prepared for what comes out of them.”

  “What do you mean, Mistress?” asked old Turley, his hairless face wrinkled in puzzlement. “The Xixies are digging down into the earth like worms.”

  “Yes,” said Saqri. “But more than half their soldiers, their supplies, and ships remain on the surface. So we are not going down—we are going up.”

  Barrick thought the idea was bizarre. Surely they did not have time to waste fighting on the beaches of Brenn’s Bay! And what hope did they have in any case—a few hundred fairies, fishermen, and creatures no bigger than mice? Either the Xixians’ cold steel or the coming of Midsummer would destroy them all. He felt cold and withdrawn at the thought. Saqri’s plan seemed nonsense.

  And you will see it all, a voice sighed inside him, rising up from his thoughts like a single wisp of smoke. You will see many die.

  Ynnir? Lord, is that you?

  Yes, but you will lose me again. This I can see . . . The voice barely whispered in his thoughts, like a priest relating an old tale of outrage, one whose purpose had long since become obscure. I fear you are to lose everything, manchild. Everything . . .

  By the time he returned to his tent in the Qar camp, Barrick found someone had laid out a suit of fine Qar armor for him made of a type of pearly gray plate he had never seen before, as well as a high helm with a crest in the shape of laurel leaves. The armor was not new—it had many tiny scratches that had not been entirely polished away—and he could tell by the buzzing in his head that the Fireflower voices recognized it. Still, at the moment Ynnir or some other agency was keeping the Fireflower thoughts from Barrick himself, so the only memories it awakened in him were distant and unclear.

  The armor was beautifully made and he knew he would need it, but something about the gift remained hidden from his understanding and that troubled him.

  21

  Call of the Cuttlehorn

  Zmeos, whom many named the Horned Serpent, retreated into mourning in his brother’s castle and thereafter kept the sun’s light to himself. For years the northern lands remained lost in winter.

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

  “WHEN THEY COME AGAINST YOU,” his sergeant Donal Murroy had told him, “you’ll think at first they’re endless and all the same, like waves breaking against the causeway. Don’t let that fool you.”

  It had been one of Ferras Vansen’s first nights alone on sentry duty with the old soldier. He could still remember every word.

  “Did you really fight them?”

  Murroy had spit over the edge of the wall, then ducked back when the wind changed. “The Xixies? Aye, lad. Two years fighting for King Olin when he was a young man—and I was, too! Siege of Hierosol. That old bastard, Parak. He was autarch then. Parnad’s his son.”

  Now it was Parnad’s son, Sulepis, that Vansen in turn had to face. The names changed, but the aggression of the Xixian army
seemed to go on and on.

  “What do you mean, don’t let that fool you?” the young Vansen had asked.

  “They’re not all the same. Our armies here in the north, we pull them together when we need them. We’re lucky if we can run a few kerns with spears out first to trouble the other side’s horses. The autarch keeps a hundred thousand men under arms at all times. He has to, to keep down all those Xandian countries he’s conquered. Biggest army since the great days of Hierosol itself, and each soldier has a different place in it. By the balls of Volios, boy, did you know there’s an entire company that does nothing but feed and water the autarch’s elephants?”

  Vansen had never even seen an elephant. “Truly?”

  “Truly. Pray you never have to come up against those beasts, lad. Big as a house and they can take arrows like a miner’s mouse. I’ve seen them pluck up a grown man and throw him a hundred feet through the air, like Bram Stoneboots in the old stories. They are demons to fight.” Murroy had paused to spit again. “Here was how the autarch’s army came at us at Hierosol.” Unlike most soldiers, old Murroy had believed in knowing his enemies well, something he had done his best to teach Vansen. “First were the Naked, as they’re called—infantry, armed with spears and shields. Most of them are from the subject countries, Sania, Zan-Kartuum, Tuan, Iyar, but their officers are all Xixies. They come like the waves on Brenn’s Bay—the autarch will throw them at the enemy for hour upon hour. Behind them were the Hakka Slingers, the gunners, and the Great Thunder, his cavalry—desert riders on horses fast as the wind. When they charge, all you can do is wait and trust your spears and your shield-wall.

  “And of course,” the sergeant had continued, spitting over the side once more as if to rid himself of the memory of waiting for the Great Thunder to strike, “the gods-cursed autarch has his special troops as well, his White Hounds, who are captured Trigonates from the north, and his Leopards, his personal riflemen and bodyguards. Each trained Leopard guard, they say, is worth a full rank of lesser soldiers.”