Shadowheart s-4

by Tad Williams

  "Ho! That makes her sound much more interesting."

  Brother Gunis, the young priest, finally intervened. "Here, now," he said, turning on the soldiers. "You are talking about the Golden One's prisoner, which is bad enough, but if I had been listening to your filthy tongues wagging, I would have heard you insult Queen Arimone, too, and that could send you both to the royal strangler."

  The guards murmured an apology. Gunis turned around, his head held high.

  "Prig," she heard one guard say quietly.

  "Never touched a woman, that one," the other muttered. "No stones left."

  Some of the tunnels were narrow enough that Qinnitan and her captors had to back up if a cart was coming the other way so that the vehicle could get by. Most of the carts were loaded with dirt and chunks of ore coming back up from places where the engineers were still working, but others carried more disturbing cargo, corpses loosely wrapped in the soldiers' own cloaks, bare feet protruding because their boots, which they themselves might have received from another dead man, had been passed on to another soldier.

  What more proof did any of these men need, Qinnitan wondered, that they were nothing to their master Sulepis but murderous toys? When the life was out of one it was stripped of anything useful and then thrown on a midden heap.

  The number of shrouded corpses that passed them moved Qinnitan in conflicting ways. She had long since given up hope of ultimate escape for herself, but she was heartened to see that these northerners were resisting the autarch. Still, every one of these shapes bouncing lifelessly past on the wagons was a young man of Xis or its dependent countries, no different from her own brothers or even poor, mad Jeddin.

  But if the autarch won here, or did whatever it was he had come for, so far away from Great Xis, then it seemed soon the entire world would be nothing more than food for his greed and cruelty. Soon even the oceans would not offer escape from his rule-he would hold all lands everywhere in his grip. Sulepis was young enough and powerful enough, and he was certainly mad enough, to make that horror real.

  They had reached the edge of the military's subterranean camp. They were still far above any fighting, although Qinnitan could hear traces of it for the first time, faint, distant shouts and the occasional boom of something that almost sounded like cannons. The guards who stopped them now seemed much more intent and cautious than the others they'd seen so far, and certainly more so than the ragtag soldiers who had accompanied them down from the surface. A mulasim had even come out to question them, an officer wearing the infantry crest of the Naked.

  "If she is bound to the Golden One, then we will take her to him," the officer said. "Or rather, we will take her to the Leopards, who will take her to the minister in charge, who will decide what happens next."

  "But I must…" Gunis began.

  "With all respect, Brother," the captain said, "you must do nothing except what you are told. If the prisoner is so important, why did you bring her without even the seal of your superior?"

  "The seal?" Gunis seemed dazzled and confused by the mere idea. "Do you mean I should take her all the way back to the high chaplain?"

  "I'm not saying anything." The mulasim was a squat, grizzled man with the skeptical face of a market peddler but the arms of a wrestler. Now he stepped up until he was face-to-face with the young priest; the soldier was no taller, but a great deal bigger. "I'm saying that this is a problem, and you haven't helped me any by showing up." He scowled fiercely and looked around. "I'll need at least two men to take her forward, and the gods know, I've none to spare."

  "But I have two guards…!"

  The captain laughed. "These?" he said, gesturing at the soldiers who had accompanied them from the surface. "These two pricklepigs? Fat lot of good they'd have been if you'd run into a pack of those Yisti devils coming up out of the ground! No, you two can turn and hurry back to your important work guarding the dung pits. Go on with you, or I'll have you in irons just like this little girl!"

  The guards did not need another warning. They were already a dozen hurrying steps away when Gunis finally found his breath. "What about me? I… I was entrusted with this girl. I must be the one to accompany her."

  "Entrusted?" The officer looked from Qinnitan to the monk. "By slavers?" He turned back to Qinnitan. "Do you speak any of our tongue, child?"

  For a moment Qinnitan was too surprised to have been addressed to say anything. "Yes. I am Xixian. Please, do not send me to the Golden One! I was taken by mistake from the Hive…"

  The captain glared. "I asked you a question, not to sing all the verses of the Morning Prayer. In a million, million years I would not interfere with something that was a matter for the Golden One, or at least those around him, to decide." He turned back to survey the men in his vicinity. "Now, who to send…?"

  Somebody shouted, then there was a loud crash. Everyone around Qinnitan turned. A cartload overstacked with stones had run one of its wheels off the track on the level just above and the cart was wobbling precariously, half off the edge. A moment later it overtipped and several of the stones fell, sending the men staring up at it from below jumping hurriedly out of the way. The cart wobbled and then the whole mass slowly toppled over and broke into pieces on the stony ground below, sending rocks bounding in all directions.

  Qinnitan did not need to be invited: she ran, shaking the loose shackles off her wrists as she went. She did not have time to think, but simply chose the nearest passage leading out of the wide chamber and sprinted toward it, sharp stones poking through the flimsy Marchland shoes the farmer's wife had given her to wear.

  Darkness punctuated with the glow of torches. Men's faces turning toward her as she ran, some with their mouths open like masks of roaring demons, shouting questions at her. Qinnitan knew her one chance was to get out of sight of any witnesses and then hide.

  A soldier snatched at her as she dashed past, and although he could not hold her, his brief grasp made her stumble. As she wobbled, trying to get her weary legs back beneath her, somebody else stuck out a foot, and she tripped and fell hard on the stony ground.

  "What's this?" someone demanded in a harsh desert accent as she lay whimpering and trying to catch her breath. "A spy?"

  She did not get up, or at least did not remember getting up. A moment later something hit her hard on the back of her head and drove the rest of the thoughts away.

  It was the bees. She knew that buzzing, had felt it deep in her bones and guts many times. On a day when the bees were said to be happy they could be marked throughout the Hive, a sturdy rumble so low it was felt, not heard.

  It had all been a dream, then-just a dreadful dream. Duny was in the next bed and soon they would be up, washing their hair together in cold water. She would tell her friend the silly dream she'd had and they would laugh-as if little Qinnitan, who scarcely had grown breasts, would ever be chosen as a wife of the great autarch! All the girls would laugh, but Qinnitan didn't mind. She was happy to be in her home, and safe-watched over by the bees, and by the priestesses, and even by great Father Nushash himself.

  But why did the buzzing of the sacred Bees of Nushash have words…?

  "… is Panhyssir? You summoned… hour…"

  "… too much. The high priest would… than he…"

  Her head hurt. Her knees hurt. Her arm hurt badly. She wondered if it might be broken. What had happened?

  "Enough, Vash, you are tiring me, walking around flapping your hands like an old woman. Besides, she is awake." The friendly warmth, the feeling of safety, both vanished in an instant. Qinnitan knew that voice.

  "Awake?"

  "Can't you tell? Her breathing has changed. She is lying there, bent like a bow, trying not to be noticed. And she succeeded-at least with you!" The laugh, high-pitched and musical, only made her guts churn. It was like listening to music made with instruments of human bone and skin.

  Someone bent over her-even through closed lids she could see the shadow. Whoever he was, he smelled like fruit pomanders and s
cented oil. "Are you sure, Golden One?"

  She wanted to throw up. She wanted to cry out.

  "More than sure." Another laugh. "Give her a little love-pat on the cheek. Open up your eyes, my frightened bride! You have returned to your rightful master at last."

  She did not want to see. She did not want to know. The worst had finally happened.

  "Open your eyes, or I will have them opened in a way you won't like." Still, he spoke sweetly, reasonably. Qinnitan gave up and looked at him, feeling empty and deathly cold inside.

  Sulepis was unchanged, taller than any man she knew, handsome and golden-skinned as he reclined on a mound of cushions that covered most of the floor of a large, lamplit tent hung with costly fabrics and mirrors. The autarch wore his golden falcon helmet, golden finger-stalls, and golden sandals, but nothing else. His brown flesh appeared smoother than any mere human skin, as though he had been carved from soapstone.

  He raised his hand toward her, spreading his long fingers as though he could stretch them out from a dozen feet away and wrap them around her. "Your blood flows true, priest's daughter. Your heritage feels the nearness of destiny, of the great change coming to this world, and draws you to me. You have returned just in time." He smiled, a brilliant slash of white across his narrow face that in someone else would have looked joyous, but which was inhuman as a crocodile's smirk. The autarch had her-for all her frantic labors, she had failed and it had all come to nothing.

  He pointed a long, gold-tipped finger. "You are a rare one, child, and that should be rewarded. I promise you will die last so you can see it all-yes, you will see me put on glory like a cloak of peacock feathers…"

  23

  A Storm of Wings "Little Adis began to dream nightly about a flock of martlets that flew around his head. The little birds told him they could not land because the ground was too cold. They were doomed forever to remain in the air…"

  -from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"

  The names and the visions crowded in on Barrick like beggars-the moment just before the charge, repeated over and over again throughout the People's history like a nightmarish ritual…

  The Ghostwood, where the Dreamless waited in their shrouds, invisible in the twilight, all their handpicked stratimancers whispering death-songs at the same moment so that the whole forest rustled, though no wind was blowing…

  … Shivering Plain, where Yasammez fought her enemies in armor that glowed scarlet like sword-iron in a forge…

  … the screams around Giant's Cairn and the horrors that had waited for the first riders to top Blue Wolf Ridge…

  All those terrible moments crowded in on him, or at least the Fireflower's memories of those moments, all the times the People had fought with their very survival at stake, all those dull, painful martyrdoms that together were called the Long Defeat. Even with his eyes closed, the phantoms still surrounded Barrick, a thousand different voices from a hundred different ages, all that the Fireflower had seen and heard and thought now swept through him like crackling sparks.

  We have always fought and we have always lost-even when we won… Winding through it all came a faint, dry thought he could scarcely pick out from the cloud of memory and lamentation-a whiff of humor dry as dust. Perhaps someday we should try to win by losing…

  Ynnir, my lord! Will you stay with me?

  But that intimate stranger's voice had already trailed away into silence.

  Barrick's Qar armor felt no heavier than another layer of skin and the laurel helm fit him just as comfortably. But the thing he wore most lightly was his own self, which seemed no more substantial-a fraction of the weighty whole, a flame to its candle. Barrick felt utterly careless, even fearless: to die would only be to lose his body and float away as all the thoughts and memories that had been Barrick Eddon scattered like dandelion fluff. And the Qar memories inside me, the Fireflower kings… they would be scattered, too…?

  Saqri came toward him in her white-and-blue war armor. She looked Barrick up and down and did not say anything, but he knew her well enough to see the single mote of disquiet-the subtle, tiny trace which was recognizable to the Fireflower only because of generations of experience with the women of Crooked's descent. "The last of the Xixian column has just passed on their way down from the surface," she announced quietly. "Be ready." She turned and walked away.

  "She is not like Yasammez," said a deep, rumbling voice beside him. "She does not like killing, even when she must."

  Barrick turned to discover massive Lord Hammerfoot standing near him-and not just Hammerfoot, but a spectral blur of all the Ettins that the custodians of the Fireflower had ever known, so many memories that, if Barrick did not concentrate, they fogged his mind like winter glass. The master of the Ettins stared back at him, the burning coals of his eyes barely visible beneath the helmet that further shadowed his great, ugly face. "I will watch out for you, Barrick of the Eddons, fear not." The creature's voice was so deep that Barrick could scarcely understand him. Hammerfoot slapped at his ax, a monstrous thing with a blade half the size of a small table. "Give me a lot of room when I start swinging Chastiser here. He's a big lad, needs a lot of room when he gets playful." He patted the massive ax. "You may soon notice, Barrick Eddon, that unlike Saqri, I enjoy killing men. Do not take it amiss."

  "You… you speak my tongue… our-what do you call us, sunlanders?" Barrick asked. "You speak our sunlander tongue very well."

  "Used to hunt your folk and eat them, to tell it square," Hammerfoot admitted. "Means I had to live close enough to get to know them." The Ettin didn't seem to be joking now. He shook his broad head. "Who would ever have thought…?"

  Barrick could not easily of summon anything to say to that.

  A silent signal from Saqri sent the drows forward at last, scuttling down the uneven passage in almost complete silence. Hammerfoot stepped out after them, his footfalls so heavy Barrick could feel them through his own bones. "Stay with me, human," Hammerfoot growled. "Even better, stay behind me. And do everything I tell you."

  The Fireflower specters were singing excitedly in Barrick's head and the drows were running, and a few moments later they all burst out of the passageway and into the wider corridor known as the Great Delve, which led ultimately under the bay and up to the Xixian camp on the far side of the water-Saqri's goal. The troops who had marched past on their way to join the autarch below had already vanished.

  The drows and Hammerfoot did not hesitate, turning in the opposite direction and hurrying up the wide track toward the world above. Barrick sped to a trot, grateful for the solid but featherweight Qar armor. He had just looked back to see Saqri and the others pouring out of the branch-tunnel behind him when a roar from Hammerfoot made him stumble and almost fall.

  Just ahead, a Xixian platoon had appeared around a bend of the passage. They shouted in alarm at the sight of the approaching Qar and quickly ranged themselves across the road, raising their shields to head height and leveling their spears in bristling formation, but even in the dim light of the tunnel's torches Barrick could see the southerners' eyes widen in terror as Hammerfoot bellowed even louder and thundered toward them, Chastiser spinning above his head. Every single one of the Xixians lifted their shields, but that did those who were in front of Hammerfoot no good: the gigantic ax fell with a swift, savage crunch. The shrieking of those crushed beneath the weapon and their own crumpled shields was horrible to hear.

  The Xixians a little farther back escaped the giant's first onslaught but were caught with their shields up as the drows running behind Hammerfoot quickly reached them and began ripping at the soldiers' legs and feet with the hooks on the base of their short spears, tumbling dozens of the dark, bearded men to the gravel track.

  Then the Ettin bellowed a word the drows seemed to recognize. The little men dropped to the stone; Hammerfoot snatched up Barrick, then turned and threw himself to the floor as well. A moment later a swarm of arrows snapped out of the Qar ranks and
feathered the first row of Xixian soldiers. The wounded and dying sagged back and tangled the men behind them.

  Barrick dimly heard Saqri's voice, although he could not say whether in his ears or in his head, since the battle was already casting a thousand shadows in his mind, and it was all he could do simply to understand what he saw before him.

  Saqri's deadliest hand-to-hand fighters, Tricksters and Changing People, now leaped out. Within moments they were in among the Xixians and drawing blood with blade and talon so quickly that armored, bearded men appeared to fall untouched to their red-soaked knees, worshiping swift shadows. But the autarch's soldiers were no cowards-these men had fought many enemies, if not any stranger ones-and within moments had begun to recover from the initial surprise and retaliate. A few clashing, shouting knots began to form in the chaos, and in places the Qar were being pushed back. When somebody fell against a wall and knocked down a torch, it was quickly stamped into sparks and the hallway became even darker.

  Like hired fighters performing in the halls of Kernios, he thought wildly.

  Earth Lord, the voices sang to him. We are in the Earth Lord's house. His vengeance will be terrible-if we fail, we lose more than our lives…!

  We fought him and his brothers on Silvergleam's walls cried others, flung this way and that in Barrick's thoughts like leaves in a gale. Do not catch Death's cold eye! Do not let him freeze your heart as he did Lord Silvergleam's…

  For Whitefire! For the Children of Breeze!

  No. Find yourself, said Ynnir's voice, closer than the rest. Find yourself only. Let the rest go.

  Barrick grabbed at the elusive thought, struggled to push the rest away.

  Find yourself.

  And suddenly, like a child learning the trick of walking for the first time, Barrick reached out toward himself and stepped out of the noise. What was happening was still all around him, but it slowed and grew more and more insubstantial until it seemed no more distracting than a pleasant breeze.