by Tad Williams
Heart hammering, wild as a rabbit in a trap, Briony Eddon concentrated every bit of her thought and skill on staying alive.
A man was on top of her, his knee pressing her sword back toward her chest. She didn’t quite remember how it had happened—something striking her from behind, a stumble, a slip, then this fellow out of nowhere—but it didn’t matter: in another few moments he was going to get his dagger out of his belt and he was going to kill her, and she wasn’t strong enough to stop him. Nothing in her life so far—not her family, not her royal blood or her princely protector, not even the demigoddess—could save her. Briony struggled to push back on the sword, to keep the man’s hands busy, although it felt like her arms were breaking. The Xixian hung over her in bizarre intimacy, mumbling words she could not understand, sweat dripping from his face onto hers. His gritted teeth, the mustaches like two horsetails, the huge whites of his bulging eyes, made his face a Zosimia demon-mask.
Something swooped past her head, a flicker of shadow as though someone had waved a hand in front of the sun. The pressure on her chest suddenly changed as the man rocked back, clapping his hand to his face. A moment later, he let out a strange grunt and slid limply off her.
Briony rolled over, gasping as she fought to get her breath back, then remembered her vulnerability, unhorsed in the middle of a battle. As she struggled onto her hands and knees, she caught sight of the body of the Xixian who had been trying to kill her, his tongue half out of his mouth and already swollen. An entire garden of slender needles protruded from his eyes. Needles with feathers on them.
Not needles, she realized in astonishment—arrows. Very small arrows.
People were screaming on all sides now, many of them in terror. Another shadow flickered over, then another. Briony looked up into the deepening twilight, squinting at the small shapes that swept past. Birds. Hundreds of birds were flitting through the knots of fighting men, and every time one of the birds dived and pulled up, a Xixian fell back holding his face or throat. Many of the southerners were running away without concern for direction, hands over their heads as if angry bees were attacking them.
The little man’s folk, she thought as she watched the madness. Beetlewhattsit. He said they rode birds.
Many of the Xixians were already racing madly back toward the shelter of the camp. Those remaining on the beach were rapidly finding themselves outnumbered. For the first time, Briony felt she might live to see the sun rise the next day.
Another bird snapped by, brushing her face with its wing, so close that she heard the shrill battle cry of its rider: “For the queens! For the queens!” And still more followed that one, a storm of wings dropping down in dark clouds, gliding in and out among the desperately fleeing Xixians, making them stumble and fall.
Zoria’s mercy! Briony climbed to her feet. If I live through this, I’ll remember this moment all my life . . .
24
Disobedient Soldiers
“In another dream, Adis climbed the oak tree high into the sky. As he reached the upper branches, he found he could touch the stars themselves, which sang to him, begging him to bring back their father . . .”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
ACOUPLE OF DOZEN REFUGEES from the outer keep were living in the middle of the stairwell that led to the Anglin Parlor, its walls painted in frescoes of the Connordic Mountains and scenes of the first king’s life. The folk crowding the stair were just as uninterested in the pictures on the walls as they were in making room for Matt Tinwright to get past.
He was angry to have to step over people, but he kept his feelings hidden. Some of the men were looking at his fine clothes with interest, doubtless wondering what they might fetch at one of the impromptu markets held on the green in front of the royal residence. It was shocking, of course, to be weighed for robbery by squatters right inside the king’s house, but these were not ordinary times.
One of the women reached up as he tried to get past her and ran her fingers over his sleeve. “Ooh, a pretty one in pretty clothes, aren’t you?” Tinwright pulled his arm back quickly.
One of the men took notice of his worried haste. “Hoy, are you bothering my woman?” The man started to rise. Another squatter moved a little farther into Tinwright’s path on the steps above him. “Did you hear? I asked you . . .”
He made his voice as hard as he could. “If you touch me, you will weep for it. I am on Hendon Tolly’s business. Do you mean to trifle with the lord protector’s servant?”
The man on the step above him exchanged a look with the other man, then sidled back a step toward the wall.
“Even his lordship can’t have it his own way forever,” said the first man, but he too was already in retreat. Tinwright recognized the tone of the squatters’ murmuring. They were still afraid of Tolly, but his hold on them was slipping. Half the outer keep had been leveled by the autarch’s cannons, and the lord protector had shown little interest in fighting back.
Tinwright made his way up the stairs as quickly as he dared, going just slowly enough to show that he thought himself safe. In an hour like the one that had fallen on Southmarch, he reflected, people slowly began to change into something else—something simpler, something frightened and angry enough to kill.
Hendon Tolly was standing at the narrow windows of the chamber looking down on the small, unhappy city covering the spot that had once been the royal green and all the space inside the walls of the keep to the base of Wolfstooth Spire, and if the base of the great tower had not been full of armed soldiers, Tinwright felt certain they would be squatting there as well.
“Ah, here is my pet poet,” Tolly said without looking away from the window, as though he could see what was behind him as well as before. “It has been a dreary afternoon. The day after tomorrow is Midsummer, you know. Speak some poetry for me.”
“What . . . what do you mean, Lord?” Tinwright swatted away a fly. The room seemed to be unusually full of them, even for summer.
“By the bleeding, vengeful gods, fool, you are the rhymer, not me. If you don’t know what poetry is, then I fear for the art.”
“But I bring news, my lord . . .”
Tolly finally turned. He was pale as a drowned earthworm, eyes deep sunken and shadowed with blue, his fine, high brow covered with sweat. His clothes and hair were in such disarray that Tinwright could half believe the dandyish Tolly had just fought his way through the same crowd that had accosted him on the stairs. But it was Hendon Tolly’s eyes that were most disturbing. Something bright and shiny but unknowable burned there—a monstrous secret, perhaps, or a vast, subtle joke that Tolly alone of all living creatures could understand.
The lord protector bent a little, as if he was bowing. His sword was in his hand so quickly Tinwright did not see the movement until the point was quivering a handsbreadth from his chest. “I do not want news ... yet,” Tolly said carefully. “I want verse. So speak, poet, or I will hand you your heart.”
“... For if your ear
Shall once a heavenly music hear,”
Tinwright recited, nearing the end of one of Hewney’s bits of doggerel,“Such as neither gods nor men
But from that voice shall hear again,
That, that is she, oh, Heaven’s grace,
’Tis she steals sweet Siveda’s place ...”
“Enough.” Tolly made a quick gesture like a man shaking warmth back into cold fingers; when he had finished, his sword was in its scabbard again. “Now pour me a cup of wine—you may have one yourself if you feel a need. There is a middling Perikal on the table. You will know it because it is the only jug still upright. Then you may give me your report on the Godstone.”
Tinwright picked the wine out from among the empty casualties that littered the table. As he did so, he noticed for the first time an odd bundle of clothes in the corner of the room, a bundle from which a single bare man’s foot protruded. Tinwright felt his stomach rise into his throat,
choked it down, then leaned on the table for a moment with eyes closed, regaining control.
“What’s taking you so long?” Tolly turned. “Ah, him. Yes, that pig of a butler will never again tell me that we have no red wine.” He laughed suddenly. “As the blood was running out of him onto the floor, I said, ‘What do you think? Does it need to air a bit?’ He didn’t laugh.”
Trying his hardest not to look at the silent thing in the corner, Tinwright delivered the wine and quickly downed his own.
Tolly took a long, savoring sip. “Now, speak.”
Matt Tinwright did his best to make his days and nights of reading into something easily understood, but it was not an easy chore. He explained to Tolly, who did not appear to be listening very closely, how the Hypnologos sect had believed that the gods were not awake, but only touched humans in dreams, and that the scene of the gods’ downfall had played out right here, in Southmarch Castle—or at least somewhere nearby.
“The stone was here. It was in the Erivor Chapel and had been made into a statue of Kernios.”
“That old cuckold,” said Tolly with an angry laugh. “You see, even here old Kernios tries to keep her prisoner. But he cannot. No, I don’t care for any magical stone. If the autarch can open the gate to the land of the gods without it, so can I! We have proved you can speak the words to open the mirror just as well as Okros! Better, in fact, since you still have your life and both arms!”
“My lord?” Tinwright suddenly wondered if Tolly had heard a word he was saying. “I don’t understand any of ...”
“Of course you don’t, so shut your mouth and listen. I spent months with Okros, learning the truth that hides behind other truths. The Hypnologoi have a sign they use to know each other—Okros was one himself! Their learning is secret and shared only among themselves ... and certain others, such as me, who sponsor their inquiries.
“It’s the land of the gods we’re talking about, poet—the very place you prating verse-spouters are always on about. The place where they sleep and dream. The autarch seeks to open it up and take the power for his own. But I know how to do it just as well as he—Okros was ready, it had been the study of his life, you see?—and I have all the things I will need to do it. The stone ... that is something else, something foolish, a mere precaution that Okros already told me was likely not needed. We have a mirror that will serve the task perfectly well, whether the southerner has one of his own or not. But what we need, ah, what we need now ... is the blood.”
Tinwright was caught by surprise. He took a step back, heart beating very fast. “But, Lord Tolly, I have worked so hard for you ...”
Tolly laughed even louder. “Do you think I mean you? Do you think any immortal is going to smell the mud that runs in your veins and come running, especially when she’s been asleep for a thousand years and more?” He threw back his head and laughed even louder, an edge of madness in it. “Ah, I have not felt so cheerful all day! Your blood! Fool of a poet!” He turned and slapped Matt Tinwright across the face so hard that Tinwright fell to his knees, stunned. “Do not ever presume,” the lord protector said, his voice suddenly a snarl, “that you are like me. The blood that runs in the Eddon family’s veins and also runs in mine is the holy ichor of Mount Xandos—the blood of the gods themselves! But to open the proper doorway, that blood must be spilled from a living heart, and I assure you it won’t be mine.” He laughed again, but this time it was a distracted growl. “No, we must find a proper sacrifice. Almost all the Eddons are gone from here ... but there is still one left who carries the sacred blood.”
Matt Tinwright was confused and frightened. He had not heard Tolly talk this way before, as if he believed the maddest of the old tales and meant to act on them. “Eddon blood ... ?” Who could Tolly mean—old Duchess Merolanna? But she was from somewhere else, wasn’t she? Not of the Eddon bloodline, whatever that truly meant—she had only married an Eddon, like Queen Anissa ...
Anissa. He had almost forgotten about her. Tolly had been manipulating her for quite some time, long before Tinwright himself had become the lord protector’s unwilling servant. Anissa, who had married the king and had given birth to King Olin’s last ...
“... Child?” Tinwright had been frightened before, but now he felt sickened as well. “You ... you don’t mean the child, do you? Anissa’s child?”
Tolly nodded. “Young Alessandros, indeed. He is exactly what I need. Take soldiers and fetch him to me. Do not harm Anissa, though—I may still have some need of her.” He stood looking out the window again, staring down at the lights of campfires.
Tinwright wanted it not to be true; he wanted to have misunderstood. “You want me to steal the queen’s baby—the king’s son?”
“If you are too craven just to take it, you may tell Anissa whatever you like,” said Tolly, waving his hand as if stealing a woman’s only child was an everyday sort of task. “Tell her that I mean to have the priests give him a special blessing or something like that. No, then she will wish to come along. I don’t care, poet—time is short! Just bring the child back to me here. Take two guards along. Three of you should be able to deal with a single small Devonisian woman. Now go, curse you. Make haste!”
Child stealer. Tinwright stumbled out of the protector’s chamber, wondering how he had been consigned to the darkest, cruelest pits of the afterlife without ever noticing his own death.
Ash Nitre’s apprentice looked as though he didn’t quite believe Chert. “Are you certain you only want two donkeys?”
“Just enough to pull the cart, yes.” Chert nodded toward the line of waiting men, mostly stonecutters now too old for daily work but willing to do what they could to save Funderling Town. He wondered what they would say if they knew what he planned, but he also knew he could not afford to tell them until they were well away from the temple, on the site, isolated from the temptation to let a word or two slip. “The rest will be carried on foot. We’ve got narrow paths ahead of us. We may have to lift the donkeys over in a few places!”
“Problems enough of my own,” the apprentice said. “Cinnabar and the rest of those unbraced Guildsmen now expect us to make five more barrels a day—five!”
Here, in this quiet part of the sheltering earth, it was doubtless hard to remember sometimes what was going on only a short distance away. Still, Chert thought, Nitre and his helpers might benefit by leaving their blasting-powder mill for a day and visiting the far end of the temple estate, where the healers were hard at work all hours of the day and even the men who had not suffered badly in the fighting had faces that looked as though they came from poorly made dolls, their eyes staring blank as buttons.
“It is a war, you know,” was all Chert said.
“Oh, the Elders know I know that. Even after we go to all the work of making it, we still have to lower it down five hundred ells of rope. Do you know how long it takes to splice that much rope together well?” The apprentice shook his head. “I know it’s a war. It had better be a war, to wear me out like this.”
Flint, back today after another of his mysterious disappearances had driven Opal almost to distraction, clambered up onto the narrow seat of the wagon. Chert made certain the sacks of different ingredients were all tied before flapping the reins against the donkey’s hindquarters to start the procession. He knew enough about the making of blasting powder now that he wasn’t worried the saltpeter might catch fire and burst and kill them if it fell. Instead, he was worrying about what would happen if he had an accident on one of the steeper tracks and lost one of the large sacks completely, or—Elders forbid it!—the entire load. They had very little of anything to waste.
It was madness, of course, Chert knew. The whole idea was mad. Even if it worked correctly it might kill them all ... but there was very little chance it would work correctly.
A worker walking in front of the cart slowed as others slowed before him, then at last had to set his barrow down. Chert pulled back on the reins while the road ahead was cleared of some minor blockage
. He worried that he might have exaggerated the chances of success of this venture to Captain Vansen and the others.
“Papa Chert?”
He started. As was often the case, Flint had been silent so long he had forgotten he was there. “What, lad?”
The boy frowned as if trying to find the words to put across some particularly difficult notion. “I don’t feel well.”
“What’s wrong? Is it your middle? Are you hungry?”
Flint shook his pale head. As always, he was as solemn as a Metamorphic Brother at prayer. “No. I feel strange. Something is starting up. Coming awake.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “No. Not coming awake. Still asleep ... but coming closer.” He wrapped his slender arms around his chest as though suddenly cold. “It gets stronger. In my sleep every night I hear the singing. It’s my fault. That’s what it says. It’s my fault and it’s going to get out.”
Chert opened his mouth and then shut it. He knew that what he had been about to say, whatever it might have been—Don’t worry, lad, all will be well, or They’re just bad dreams—would have been a lie. And one thing about Flint was, it didn’t do any good to lie to him. He always seemed to know. Since the moment he had entered their lives, since the moment Opal had fed him and he had attached himself to them like a stray cat, Chert had always felt that the boy knew more than Chert did himself. And, often enough to be disturbing, Flint had proved that it was true.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked instead.
Flint looked up at him, and there was enough of the frightened child in him still, of a true frightened innocent, that Chert’s heart felt as though it would break in his breast. “I don’t know,” the boy said quietly. “I don’t think so. But sometimes I feel that I shouldn’t be here—that I should go away. Far away.”