by Tad Williams
The boy nodded, not at all displeased. "I am the only one like me, that is true. There are worse things to be, of course — average, or less than average. A failure. A nonentity. Speaking of which, did you know I was with you in Daffodil House as you stumbled around in the smoke and dust? I was watching it all through your eyes, drinking your thoughts. Oh, the poor little fairy-folk! Oh, the destruction! How sad! I drank your fear, too. It was a very pleasant experience, actually, so at least you're good for something."
Theo tried to strike at the child, but could not lift his hand more than a few inches off his lap. Struggling hopelessly, he let out a little moan of frustration and despair.
The boy smiled. "Even now, you are only still alive because of what other people did years ago, not because of anything you have done yourself." He paused for a moment and sniffed. "That sprite is still with you, isn't she, hiding somewhere? I can smell her." He smacked his lips and opened his eyes wide in a grotesque parody of juvenile pleasure. "Yum! It's too bad I've already eaten quite a lot for my afternoon meal — she would be very sweet, I think. And crunchy."
Disgust overcame Theo's exhaustion and horror, even gave him a little strength. "You're proud of not being human, aren't you? You enjoyed it when they killed our child — the baby that Cat was carrying. Eamonn Dowd might have been a bastard, might even have helped, but he didn't enjoy it like you did. Yeah, I can feel it — this thought-drinking thing doesn't just go one way. Jesus Christ, and you think being like you is better than being me?" Theo took a shuddering breath. It was difficult to speak, but he couldn't just let the thing smirk at him.
"I am what I am." The smile flashed like cold bone. "I have lived a thousand lives in my short time, seen a million indescribable things while you have trudged through a single meaningless life and muddled even that. Your pointless span will end today, but mine will go on. I have been in preparation for this since the first hour I was brought into Faerie. One day I will shake the very secrets of the universe down like fruit from a tree."
That it was his parents' faces combined here in this soulless thing, more than it being a younger version of his own face, more than any words it spoke, finally brought tears to Theo's eyes. He had not done any better a job of loving his mother and father than they had him, but there had been some love there, however muted and confused. This abomination made it all a mockery. He summoned up a little more strength. "I'll destroy you."
"Don't talk to it, Theo — oh, by the Trees, don't talk to it," Applecore whispered in his ear. "It'll only poison you."
He grunted, too tired to talk more in any case. The child laughed and turned back to the window. Destroy me? I think not. The stream of alien thought pushed its way into Theo's mind, a cold and painful intruder against which he was helpless. You are not really Septimus Violet, and you are certainly not Theo Vilmos. In fact, you are nothing.
They had reached the top of a hill at the edge of the Moonlight district, the street crowds long gone behind them, when Hellebore directed the convoy to stop and the three coaches pulled up onto the grass of a small, manicured park. The City lay below them, threads of smoke rising in many places now, especially down by the waterfront where, true to Anton Hellebore's prediction, the Remover's warehouse seemed still to be burning like the heart of the sun. Another large blaze raged in the center of town near the ivory spike of Hellebore House.
"Why have we stopped, lord?" asked Tansy. "Are we under attack?" "They are on their way," Hellebore said, although it didn't seem to explain anything. He raised his voice, perhaps talking to the invisible driver of the coach. "Give me my birds. I wish a closer look at Strawflower Square."
The two ogre guards got out — the massive coach rocked as their weight was removed — and made a quick check around the vicinity. Satisfied that the park did not contain an ambush, they stood in the muted sun, stretching their long, slab-muscled gray arms and whispering quietly to each other. The bubble dome of the coach flickered just as the windows of Hellebore's penthouse office had, and suddenly the natural cityscape was gone across one side, replaced by a bizarre street-level view of the riot zone around the Parliament, as though the coach in which Theo sat had suddenly dived down into the City center like a submarine.
"The constables have been reinforced, but I see there is still resistance," said Hellebore. "Too much resistance. I think that when this has ended, Lord Monkshood will no longer hold domain over the constables — this has been a debacle. Well, I will do what his men cannot."
Theo was too distracted by what he was seeing in the actual sky above them to pay much attention to the scenes of constables and mounted grims fighting across the rubble of Strawflower Square's fountains and benches and public walkways. Coming down through the clouds like kites on a single string were three vast serpentine shapes. It was so much like that awful day in Daffodil House that for a moment he found himself plunged into a disassociated near-faint, suspended in a loop of unreality where dragons were always coming down the sky toward him like living missiles.
The huge beasts dropped so fast that it seemed as though they must crash down on the hillside where Theo's coach stood, must smash and destroy the caravan and everything in it, Hellebore and Theo and Applecore and the monstrous, pink-faced child. He found himself half-praying for it as the huge, dark bodies plummeted toward them. Then, just a few hundred feet overhead, three mighty pairs of batlike wings flared out and the dragons' descent suddenly flattened. They swooped over the park, only a couple of hundred feet off the ground, with a crack of air that knocked the ogre bodyguards to their knees, ripped branches from the bending trees and made the coaches rock crazily on their suspensions. Theo could see that the nearest dragon had a rider, a small, humanoid shape crouched in a boxy glass case strapped around the massive neck just in front of the wings. The stink of the monsters, sulfur and a rank, sour odor like the alligator pool at the San Francisco Aquarium on a hot day, lingered in Theo's nostrils even after the dragons themselves were only dwindling shapes against the City skyline.
As horrible as the creatures' passage had been, he still found himself turning with a kind of miserable avidity to the coach window that displayed Strawflower Square, not so much wanting to see what would happen next as unable to avoid looking. There was a feeling of supreme aliveness in witnessing such horror, he knew that now: it sang in the blood. To watch death, no matter how terrible, was to be alive oneself, at least for a few moments longer.
The dragons entered the mirror-picture of the square first as long shadows that whipped across the crowd so quickly that many of the combatants didn't even look up — but terror filled the faces of all who did see them, even the parliamentary constables. Only the grims kept their faces set hard and cold, as if a long-anticipated moment had finally come, although they threw themselves from their unicorns and scrambled for shelter like the rest of the shrieking multitude. The dragons rushed past like stunting jet planes, wrenching tornados of dirt and trash up in their wake, even pieces of clothing ripped from rioters' backs. For a suspended moment all sign of the monsters disappeared from the scene Theo was watching, so that the thousands of people fleeing randomly in all directions seemed conceived of a kind of mass-psychosis, but then the shadows fell across the square once more, followed immediately by the fire.
The first great gout swept across the broad steps in front of New Mound House like a broom of orange flame — a broom that did not merely tumble away that which was in front of it but burned it to black carbon. The flames were so hot that the sudden blooms of ash seemed to hold the shapes of the fleeing victims for an instant before bursting into whirling, sparking fragments.
Applecore was weeping loudly beside Theo's ear, but he had no more tears. He could only watch, limp and numb — the second time he had been forced to witness a horror no one should ever have to see once.
The viewpoint of the mirror-screen was shifting now, moving rapidly away from the destruction and refocusing elsewhere in the square. Jarred by the unsteady movem
ent, Theo found a moment's refuge in wondering what kind of birds these were, magical or mechanical, that acted as Hellebore's eyes at the scene.
The dragons made another pass, sweeping the square with flame, killing all that could not escape, rioters and riot-fighters, civilians and constables. A maddened unicorn ran past the fountain, its mane trailing fire. But Theo saw something else happening, too, something so strange that even Hellebore sat up in his leather seat.
"Blood and iron," growled the fairy lord, "what are they doing?" The grims, alone of all the living things in Strawflower Square, were not running for their lives — or at least they had not run very far. Knots of them had taken up places where they were shielded from the worst of the inferno by buildings or statuary, and now were working with a swift economy of movement, unpacking long poles that had hung beside their saddles, bending these staves and stringing them.
"Bows?" Hellebore sounded angry as well as surprised, as though the spectacle were aesthetically displeasing. "They are going to fight dragons with arrows?"
As the winged monsters came in on their next pass several of the grims leaped out from behind their makeshift ramparts and raised their bows. A dripping burst of fire caught two of them and turned them into shrieking, jigging torches, but the others loosed their arrows before running for cover again.
"Are they mad, these skin-eaters?" Hellebore demanded. "They hunted dragons in the old days, Stepfather." The Terrible Child sounded amused. "They do what they know best. I think it involves some kind of very powerful poison."
As the dragons wheeled and their shadows again dropped onto the square, a full dozen more of the grims darted from cover and fired their shafts; with their long, almost apelike arms, the wild goblins were perfectly suited to draw such tall, heavy bows. The dragons spat death and then wheeled away. The grims kept loosing arrows until the great winged worms turned and came down again, blazing.
Again and again the liquid flame splashed across the square, which was now covered with leaping fires even where there seemed nothing that could burn. Again and again wild goblins were caught and martyred by the spray, but others ran out in the dragons' wake, firing up into the air before the giant creatures could rise out of range. At first it seemed that it was all just some goblin-gesture, a bit of primitive bravery in the face of certain death, but finally on the sixth or seventh pass all the shadows did not disappear as the dragons swung out of range: one shadow grew in size until darkness covered the entire square. The goblins stared up, shouting to each other and pointing before running for cover as the shadow rapidly began to grow smaller and blacker: the monster was falling.
The dragon dropped out of the sky and hit the ground so hard that one of the buildings along the square shuddered and collapsed, adding its own dust to the flume of black blood and gobbets of molten pavement thrown up by the creature's fall. Other facades shook and the few windows left unbroken now shattered. Then all was silence, the square motionless except for the jittering of flames, the monster lying dead in a crater at the center of a spiderweb of cracked stone with a thicket of arrows protruding from its great filming eye and more picketing its long throat, its tail stretched across the smoldering steps of New Mound House like the snapped cable of a suspension bridge.
"It cannot be," said Hellebore. Theo had never imagined he would see the fairy lord so astonished. He almost looked mortal. "It cannot be."
"But it is, Stepfather," said the child. "Look and your eyes will tell you the truth. The goblins have killed one of your big lizards. Do you doubt they will manage to kill the rest, too? They can afford to sacrifice a few dozen to bring down each one — they will think it a good trade. And can you imagine what will happen to Hellebore House when the mob realizes the high families are actually vulnerable? If you had been paying attention to your private line you would have just heard the security force calling out to you, telling you that our house is surrounded." The Terrible Child definitely appeared to be more entertained than upset by what had happened. "And the grims have more weapons than simply bows and arrows, the commander says — they are shooting out the windows of our tower with lightning-throwers and many of the guards are dead."
"We won't be vulnerable long," said Hellebore. "Into the coach!" he shouted at the ogre bodyguards. "Drive! Now! Straight to the Cathedral!" The ogres did not even have time to climb all the way into their seats before the armored coach spun around on the park lawn, spitting divots of grass and mud; one of the huge gray creatures almost rolled on Theo — which, he couldn't help thinking, would at least be a faster way to die than whatever Hellebore had planned for him.
"They did it," Applecore crowed softly by his ear. "Did you see? It was brilliant!" He couldn't help feeling pride. What the goblins had done was more than a heroic gesture — Hellebore was set back, even a little scared. And Theo and Cumber Sedge had helped it happen.
Good old Button, he thought. That will serve the Flower bastards right for underestimating him. Within minutes they were driving through a sudden mist into a part of the City he had never seen, a district he did not remember even being described in Dowd's journal. The buildings on either side of the increasingly narrow road were odd conglomerations of stone and earth that looked almost like termite mounds or some ancient archaeological site. The dark, foggy streets were empty, and the strange buildings seemed empty too, doors and unglassed windows gaping like the eyes of skulls piled in a catacomb. Even the mist seemed to be growing thicker as the convoy made its way down the sloping streets between the crude, closeleaning buildings.
No , Theo realized, it isn't just the mist. The sky itself was growing darker overhead, as though afternoon was ending and evening coming on fast. But evening should still be hours away. Can you have a power blackout in the sky?
Hellebore was snapping orders on his invisible private line, the child was looking calmly out the window, and Tansy seemed lost in some personal realm of pain, but Theo still whispered as he asked Applecore, "Where are we? Why is it getting dark already? Is it the smoke from the fires?"
"We're driving into Midnight," she said in his ear. Her moment of joy had evaporated and her voice trembled. "It's not good, Theo. Ever since the king and queen died, nobody comes here except for funerals. It's . . . it's thick."
"What's thick?"
"Everything. It just is. Faerie — it gets thick here." The Terrible Child stirred, took a deep ecstatic breath. "It is the heart of the realm, home to the first mound where civilization began — but it was alive long before that." He smiled and nodded. "It is where the edges are, where things come in and go out, are born . . . and die." The Terrible Child pushed his way into Theo's head: You will find it instructive, my almosttwin — for a little while.
Applecore moved in even closer to Theo's neck, although she was on the far side from the boy. "Don't talk to him!" But he could not resist. The grims' killing of the dragon had heartened him. "And this is where you're going to bring on this, what is it called, Eternal Night?"
"Old Night. Ah, yes. But I will not bring it on, as you say. It already is. I will simply open a door so that it can make its way to the mortal world. Not that your world is a stranger to it, to the old ways and the old nightmares. But there are only a few small points of contact now — like tiny holes in an otherwise watertight ship, they are not enough to change things. But I will open a great gash in the side of reality as they know it on your world — a hole too big for patching or bailing. Once Old Night starts pouring in, bringing chaos such as even your troubled world has not known in a thousand years or more, nothing will stop it." He sighed. "It will be lovely. Like bathing in a river of discordant music. A blizzard of dark light. Screams, useless prayers, the unique sound of the very lattices of reality coming apart — I will drink it all in, until I am intoxicated. It was what I have waited my entire life to do."
Theo was sickened, but would not show it. "All, what, seven years?" "I have had as many moments of life as you, my half brother, my blind and deaf twin, but mine
have passed in this world. We age more slowly here, breathing the airs of Faerie, but you know the date of my birth — that was something else of mine that was given to you."
"But you know what I had that you didn't? A real family. A life." Theo wanted to hurt the smiling creature shaped like a child any way he could, as though it were the worst parts of himself that sat beside him, gloating and mocking. "Love. Do you even know what that is?"
The Terrible Child laughed. "Do you?" Hellebore turned in irritation. "Shut your mouth." Something seized control of Theo and he could no longer speak. The child smiled and looked out the window.
The battle-coaches drove on, the winding road taking them down into what seemed a kind of wooded valley thick with ground fog. Great corridors of uninterrupted darkness yawned between the trees. Empty buildings still stood on either side of the bumpy road, but they had been dug straight into the ground and seemed almost invisible: only dusty openings too regular be animal dens, or here and there a jut of roof protruding from a pile of dirt or tangle of leaves showed that someone had once lived there.
"I don't like this place," Applecore moaned. "It's bad." Theo could not talk and could barely move. He let his head loll back and stared up through the domed top of the coach at the tips of the tall old trees. The tops of the treeline on either side shimmied up and down as they passed like wave patterns on an oscilloscope. Something was tracking them from high above, a minuscule winged shape barely visible against the darkening sky, and for a heart-freezing moment Theo thought it was another dragon coming down from the heights, but he realized he would never have been able to see anything that far up through the swirling mists. It was a gray bird, passing back and forth only a few dozen yards overhead as though it were keeping the car in sight — an owl, or perhaps a small hawk. Then the mists thickened and the sky seemed to grow darker. As he lost sight of the bird he felt a moment of sadness.