by Tad Williams
“Stay!” Skodi cried. “Why do you go away?” She looked around wildly, flapping her large arms; her exhilarated expression was gone. “The sword!” she shrieked at the covey of children. “Stop crying, you stupid oxes! Where is the sword? Vren!”
“Inside, Skodi,” the little boy said. He was holding one of the smaller children on his lap. Despite the curious sense of dislocation—or perhaps because of it—Simon could not help noticing that Vren’s arms were bare and thin beneath his ragged coat.
“Then get it, you fool!” she cried, hopping up and down in a leviathan jig of rage. The face in the flames was now barely distinguishable. “Get it!”
Vren stood up quickly, letting the child in his lap slide to the ground, where it joined its wails to the general cacophony. Vren sped into the house and Skodi turned to the billowing flames once more. “Come back, come back,” she coaxed the diminishing face, “I have a present for my Lord and Lady.”
Skodi’s grip on him seemed to diminish somewhat. Simon felt himself slipping back into his body once more—a curious feeling, like donning a cloak of softly tickling feathers.
Vren appeared in the doorway, pale face solemn. “Too heavy,” he called. “Honsa, Ende, you others, come here! Come and help!” Several of the children came creeping across the snow toward the abbey at his call, looking over their shoulders at the groaning bonfire and their gesticulating caretaker. They followed Vren into the shadowed interior like a string of nervous goslings.
Skodi turned again, her round cheeks flushed, her rosy lips trembling. “Vren! Bring me the sword, you lazy thing! Hurry!”
He stuck his head out of the doorway. “Heavy, Skodi, it’s heavy like a stone!”
Skodi abruptly turned her mad eyes on Simon. “It’s your sword, isn’t it?” The face had vanished from the flames, but the stars, pale as balls of ice, still barely smoldered in the night sky; the bonfire still rippled and danced, untouched by any wind. “You know how to move it, don’t you?” Her gaze was almost intolerable.
Simon said nothing, fighting inwardly with all his might to prevent himself from babbling like a drunkard, from spilling to those compelling eyes every thought he’d ever had.
“I must give it to them,” she hissed. “They are searching for it, I know! My dreams told me that they are. The Lord and Lady will make me…a power.” She began to laugh, a girlish trill that frightened him as much as anything that had happened since the sun had set. “Oh, pretty Simon,” she giggled, “what a wild night! Go and bring me your black sword.” She turned and shouted at the empty doorway. “Vren! Come untie his hands!”
Vren popped out into the open, glaring furiously. “No!” he screamed. “He’s bad! He’ll get away! He’ll hurt you!”
Skodi’s face froze into an unpleasant mask. “Do what I say, Vren. Untie him.”
The boy loped forward, stiff with rage, tears standing in his eyes. He roughly pulled Simon’s hands out behind and thrust the knife blade between the cords. Vren’s breath came in constricted gasps as he sawed the ropes away; when Simon’s hands fell free, the Hyrka boy turned and sped back to the abbey.
Simon stood, rubbing his wrists slowly, and thought about simply running away. Skodi had turned her back on him and was crooning imploringly to the bonfire. He looked out of the corner of his eye to Binabik and Sludig. The Rimmersman still lay without movement, but the troll was struggling against his bonds.
“Take…take the sword and run, friend Simon!” Binabik whispered. “We will be escaping…somehow…”
Skodi’s voice cut through the darkness. “The sword!” Simon felt himself turning helplessly from his friend, compelled beyond any possibility of resistance. He marched toward the abbey as though prodded by an invisible hand.
Inside, the children were crouched in the darkened hearth-comer, still tugging without success at Thorn. Vren glared as Simon entered, but stepped out of his way. Simon kneeled before the sword, a hard, angular bundle shrouded in rags and hides. He unwrapped it with hands that felt curiously blunted.
As he grasped the corded hilt, the firelight spilling through the doorway painted a stripe of glowing red along Thorn’s black length. The sword shuddered beneath his fingers in a way he had not felt before, a tremble almost of hunger or anticipation. For the first time Simon felt Thorn to be something unutterably and loathsomely alien, but he could no more drop it from his hands than he could run away. He lifted it. The blade did not feel painfully heavy, as it sometimes did, but it still had a strange weightiness, as though he dragged it up from the muck at the bottom of a pond.
He found himself compelled toward the doorway. Somehow, even though she could not see him, Skodi could still move him like a straw doll. He let himself be tugged back out to the red-lit courtyard.
“Come here, Simon,” she said as he emerged, spreading her arms like a loving mother. “Come stand in the circle with me.”
“He has a sword!” Vren shocked from the doorway. “He’ll hurt you!”
Skodi laughed dismissively. “He will not. Skodi is too strong. Besides, he is my new pet. He likes me, don’t you?” She reached out her hand toward Simon. Thorn seemed to be swollen full with some awful, sluggish life. “Don’t break the circle,” she said lightly, as though they played a game. Skodi clasped his arm and pulled him to her, helping him to lift his clumsy foot over the circle of reddish dust. “Now they will be able to see the sword!” She glowed with her triumph. One of her warm pink hands clasped his atop Thorn’s hilt, the other coiled around his neck, pulling him against her pulpy breasts and stomach. The heat of the fire softened him like wax; the push of Skodi’s body against his was like a smothering fever-dream. He stood half-a-head taller, but had no more power to resist her than if he had been an infant. What sort of witch was this girl?
Skodi began to shout in piercing Rimmerspakk as she swayed against him. The lines of a face began to reform in the bonfire. Through tears that the heat forced from his eyes, Simon saw the unstable black mouth opening and closing like a shark’s. A cold and dreadful presence came down upon them—questing, questing, sniffing for them with predatory patience.
The voice roared at them. This time Simon could hear speech in the jumble of sound, unrecognizable words that made his very teeth ache.
Skodi gasped in excitement. “It is one of Lord Red Eye’s highest servants, just as I hoped! Look, sir, look! The present you want!” She forced Simon to lift Thorn, then stared eagerly at the shadowy thing moving in the blaze as it spoke again. Her exhilarated grin soured. “It does not understand me,” she whispered against Simon’s neck with the easy familiarity of a lover. “It cannot find the right road. I feared this. My charm alone is not strong enough. Skodi has to do something she did not want to do.” She turned her head outward. “Vren! We must have blood! Get the bowl and bring me some of the tall one’s blood.”
Simon tried to cry out, but could not. The heat within the circle was lifting Skodi’s fine hair like wisps of pale smoke. Her eyes seemed flat and inhuman as potshards. “Blood, Vren!”
The boy stood over Sludig, an earthenware bowl in one hand, the blade of the knife—huge in Vren’s small fingers—lying against the Rimmersman’s neck. Vren turned to look back at Skodi, ignoring Binabik as the troll struggled on the ground nearby.
“That is right, the big one!” Skodi cried. “I want to keep the little one! Hurry, Vren, you stupid squirrel, I need blood for the fire now! The messenger will go away!”
Vren lifted his knife.
“And bring it carefully!” Skodi cried. “Don’t spill any inside the circle. You know how the little ones swarm when charms are spoken, how hungry they are.”
The Hyrka boy suddenly whirled and came stalking toward Skodi and Simon, his face suffused with anger and fear. “No!” he screamed. For a moment Simon felt a rush of hope, thinking that the boy meant to strike Skodi down. “No!” Vren shrieked again, waving the knife in the air as tears coursed down his cheeks. “Why are you keeping them? Why are you keeping him!?” He jabbed h
is blade in Simon’s direction. “He’s too old, Skodi! He’s bad! Not like me!”
“What are you doing, Vren?” Skodi narrowed her eyes in alarm as the boy leaped forward toward the circle. The blade swept up, red-gleaming. Simon’s muscles burned as he strove to throw himself out of the boy’s path, but he was clenched in a hand of stone. Sweat sluiced into his eyes.
“You can’t like him!” Vren screeched. With a croaking shriek, Simon managed to squirm just enough for the blade aimed at his ribs to miss and tear along his back instead, leaving a track of cold silvery pain. Something in the fire bellowed like a bull, then the darkness fell in on top of Simon, blotting out the faded stars.
Eolair had left her alone for a moment while he went back through the great doorway to fetch another lamp.
As she waited for the Count of Nad Mullach’s return, Maegwin gazed happily down at the vast stone city in the cavern below. A great burden had been lifted from her. Here was the city of the Sithi, of Hernystir’s allies of old. She had found it! For a while, Maegwin had begun to believe herself as mad as Eolair and the others thought, but here it stood.
It had come to her at first as a certain disorder in her dreams—troubled dreams that were already dark and chaotic, full of the suffering faces of her beloved dead. Then other images began to seep through. These new dreams showed her a beautiful city rippling with banners, a city of flowers and captivating music, hidden from war and bloodshed. But these visions that appeared in the last, fleeting moments of sleep, although preferable to her nightmares, had not helped to calm her. Rather, in their richness and exotic wonder, they had inflamed Maegwin with fear for her own troubled mind. Soon, in her wanderings through Grianspog’s tunnels, she had also begun to hear whispering in the earth’s depths, chanting voices unlike anything she had ever experienced.
The idea of the ancient city had grown and flowered until it became far more important than anything happening within reach of sunlight. Sunlight brought evil: the daystar was a beacon for disaster, a lamp that the enemies of Hernystir could use to seek out and destroy her people. Only in the deeps did safety lie, down among the roots of the earth where the heroes and gods of elder days still lived, where the cruel winter could not.
Now, as she stood above this fantastic stone city—her city—a vast sense of satisfaction spread over her. For the first time since her father King Lluth had gone away to battle Skali Sharp-nose, she felt peace. True, the stone towers and domes spread across the rock canyon below did not much resemble the airy summer-city of her dreams, but there seemed small doubt that this was a place crafted by inhuman hands, and it stood in a place where no Hernystiri had walked since time out of mind. If it was not the dwelling place of the deathless Sithi, then what was it? Of course it was their city, that seemed laughably obvious.
“Maegwin?” Eolair called, slipping through the half-open door. “Where are you?” The worry in his voice brought a tiny smile to her face, but she hid it from him.
“I am here, of course. Count. Where you bade me stay.”
He came and stood at her shoulder, gazing down. “Gods of stock and stone,” he said, shaking his head, “it is miraculous.”
Maegwin’s smile came back. “What else would you expect of such a place? Let’s go down and find those who live here. Our people are in great need, you know.”
Eolair looked at her carefully. “Princess, I doubt very much that anyone is living there. Do you see anything moving? And no lights are burning but our own.”
“What makes you think that the Peaceful Ones cannot see in darkness?” she said, laughing at the foolishness of men in general and clever ones like the count in particular. Her heart was racing so that the laugh threatened to get away from her. Safety! It was a breathtaking thought. How could anything harm them in the lap of Hernystir’s ancient protectors?
“Very well, my lady,” Eolair said slowly. “We will go down a short way, if these stairs are to be trusted. But your people are worrying about you,” he grimaced,”—and me, too, before long. We must return quickly. We can always come back again later, with more folk.”
“Certainly.” She fluttered her hand to show how little such concerns affected her. They would return with all her people, of course This was the place they would live forever, out of reach of Skali and Elias and the rest of the blood-soaked madmen above ground.
Eolair grasped her elbow, guiding her with almost laughable caution. She herself felt the urge to skip down the rough-hewn stairs. What could hurt them here?
They descended like two small stars falling into a great abyss, the flames of their lamps reflecting from the pale stone roofs below. Their footsteps echoed out through the great cavern and rebounded from the invisible ceiling to be repeated in countless reverberations, returning to them as a rush of pattering sound like the velvet wings of a million bats.
For all its completeness, the city nevertheless seemed skeletal. Its inter-connected buildings were tiled in a thousand colors of pale stone, ranging from the white of a first snow through endless wan shades of sand and pearl and sooty gray. The round windows stared like unseeing eyes. The polished stone streets gleamed like the tracks of wandering snails.
They were halfway down the stairs when Eolair pulled up short, clasping Maegwin’s arm close against his side. In the lamplight his worried face seemed almost translucent; she fancied suddenly that she could see every-thing that was in his mind.
“We have gone far enough. Lady,” he said. “Your people will be hunting for us.”
“My people?” she asked, pulling away. “Are they not your people, too? Or are you now far above a mere tribe of cringing cave-dwellers, Count?”
“That is not what I mean, Maegwin, and you know it,” he said harshly.
That looks like pain in your eyes, Eolair, she thought. Does it hurt you so to be yoked to a madwoman? How could I have been fool enough to love you when I could never hope for more than polite forbearance in return?
Aloud, she said: “You are free to go whenever you wish. Count. You doubted me. Now perhaps you are frightened that you might have to face those whose existence you denied. I, however, am not going anywhere but down to the city.”
Eolair’s fine features wrinkled in frustration. As he unknowingly wiped a smear of lampblack onto his chin, Maegwin wondered suddenly what she looked like. The long, obsessive hours of searching and digging and chipping away at the bolt that secured the great door floated in her mind like a poorly-remembered dream. How long had she been down here in the depths? She stared at her dirt-caked hands with a growing sense of horror—she must indeed look the part of madwoman—then pushed the thought away in disgust. What did such things matter at an hour like this?
“I cannot let you lose yourself in this place, Lady,” Eolair said at last.
“Then come with me or bully me all the way back to your wretched camp, noble count.” She suddenly did not like the way she sounded, but it was said and she would not take it back.
Eolair did not show the anger she expected; instead, a weary resignation crept over his features. The pain she had seen before did not go away, but rather seemed to sink deeper, spreading into the very lines of his face. “You made a promise to me, Maegwin. Before I opened the door, you said you would heed my decision. I did not believe you an oath-breaker. I know your father never was.”
Maegwin pulled back, stung. “Do not throw my father up to me!”
Eolair shook his head. “Still, my lady, you promised me.”
Maegwin stared at him. Something in his careful, clever face took hold of her so that she did not hurry away down the stairs as she had intended. An inner voice mocked her stupidity, but she faced him squarely.
“You are only partly correct, Count Eolair,” she said slowly. “You could not open it yourself, if you remember. I had to help you.”
He looked at her closely. “So, then?”
“So, then, a compromise. I know you think me headstrong or worse, but I do still want your friendship, E
olair. You have been good to my father’s house.”
“A bargain, Maegwin?” he asked expressionlessly.
“If you will let us walk down to the bottom of the stairs—just until we can set foot on the tiles of the city—I will turn around and go back with you…if that is what you wish. I promise.”
A weary smile touched Eolair’s lips. “You promise, do you?”
“I swear by Bagba’s Herd.” She touched her soiled hand to her breast.
“Better you should swear by Black Cuamh, down here.” He grimaced in frustration. His long tail of hair had shed its ribbon and lay black across his shoulders. “Very well. I don’t like the idea of trying to carry you backup these stairs against your will.”
“You couldn’t,” Maegwin said, pleased. “I am too strong. Come, let’s go faster. As you said, people are waiting for us.”
They passed down the steps in silence, Maegwin reveling in the safety of shadows and stone mountains, Eolair lost in his own unvoiced thoughts. They watched their feet, fearful of a misstep despite the stairway’s great width. The stairs were pitted, crazed with cracks as though the earth had shifted in uneasy sleep, but the stonecraft was beautiful and subtle. The lamplight revealed traces of intricate designs that coiled across the steps and onto the wall above the staircase, scribings delicate as the fronds of young ferns or the shingled feathers of hummingbirds. Maegwin could not help turning to Eolair with a smile of satisfaction.
“Do you see!?” She held her lamp up to the wall. “How could this be work of any mere mortals?”
“I see it. Lady,” Eolair responded somberly. “But there is no such wall on the other side of the stairs.” He indicated the drop-off to the canyon below. Despite the distance they had already traveled downward, it was still far enough to kill someone handily. “Please don’t look at the carvings so closely that you stumble over the edge.”
Maegwin curtseyed. “I will be careful, Count.”
Eolair frowned, perhaps at her frivolity, but only nodded.
The great stairway opened out at the bottom a like fan, spreading onto the canyon floor. Away from the overhanging cavern wall, the glow of their lamps seemed to dimmish, the light not strong enough to dispel the deep and overwhelming dark. Buildings which had seemed cunning as carved toys from the height of the canyon rim now loomed above them, a fantastic array of shadowed domes and spiraling towers that tapered up into the blackness like impossible stalagmites. Bridges of living stone stretched from the cavern walls to the towers, winding in and about the spires like ribbons. Its various parts tied together with narrow integuments of stone, the city seemed more like a single, breathingly vital thing than an artifact of lifeless rock—but it was surely empty.