Shadowrise s-3

by Tad Williams

  "You're right," Vansen told him. He had been thinking, in his slow, careful way, and he could see no other road forward. "It is true-we cannot defeat the Qar. They are fierce fighters, but they also have a terror and madness on their side like nothing I have ever seen or felt. But I do not intend to beat them."

  Brother Nickel snorted in disgust. "Then why do we not simply surrender now? At least then we will be choosing the manner of our deaths."

  Copper scowled at him. "Be quiet, you burrowing, slithering priest! I for one would gladly choose to die with a war hammer in my hand, not slapping my head and begging the Earth Elders for forgiveness!"

  "Gentlemen… brothers," said Cinnabar, spreading his arms. "This is not right…"

  "Stop. You did not let me finish, Brother Nickel," Vansen said loudly. He wished that convincing the others, as difficult as it would be, was the hardest part of what he envisioned. "I do not intend to defeat the Qar because, as I said, we cannot defeat them. We cannot even hope to hold them back for very long. But I know a little of what they want here, and I may know some things even their leader does not yet know-important things." Still, even the mere thought of the Qar's dark lady made him weak with fear-he had seen her in so many of his nightmares, visions left in his head by Gyir's thoughts like shadows cast on the wall of a cave. He was terrified to face her, but what else could he do? He was a soldier, and he had given his loyalty to these folk as completely as he had to the Eddon family and their throne when he first became a royal guard. "Here is my plan," he announced as the others at last fell silent. "I intend to make peace."

  "Peace!" barked Copper. "With the Twilight People? With ettins and skinshifters? That is madness."

  Vansen's smile was grim. "If so, then madness is the only thing that can save us."

  An isolated sliver of moon hung in the sky as they crept out the side door of Chaven's observatory beside the old walls. Chert had not smelled open air for weeks and for a moment the sharpness of it was almost overwhelming. He took a couple of reeling steps, light-headed, before finding his balance. The night seemed… so big!

  Flint did not seem to notice. He looked briefly to either side and then trotted down the steps. At the bottom of the stairwell he turned to follow the road beside the wall, headed directly toward Skimmer's Lagoon as though he could see it. Chert could not suppress a shiver of fear. How did the boy know things like this? It made no sense-in fact, it refuted good sense entirely.

  Still, sensible or not, if Chert lost the boy he would catch the rough side of Opal's tongue for certain. He hurried after him.

  "Where are we going?" he whispered as Flint led them along Sheeps Hill Road at the base of the New Walls, past what seemed like a single endless encampment of refugees huddled around miserable little fires. A few of these looked up to watch the pair go past-Chert could only hope they thought he was a child, too. He grabbed Flint's arm. "Get back in the shadows, boy!"

  Citizens of Funderling Town were banned from being aboveground in Southmarch by night, in large part because of Chert himself, so not only did he have a price on his head, the mere fact of him being a Funderling would be enough to get him dragged to a cell in the stronghold. Either way, if the guards got hold of him, he was doomed.

  What am I doing? How did I let myself get talked into this? Opal would have my skin if she knew. He had a sudden moment of terror-what if his wife came back to the temple while he was gone? What would he tell her? She would scorch him! But I suppose if I'm alive at that point for her to scorch, I'll already have my joists in, he thought glumly. Might as well not borrow trouble. "Flint, where are we going?" he asked again.

  "Across Market Road Bridge, turn toward the guard tower, then stop at the fifth lantern."

  "And how do you know that? Who told you?"

  The child looked at him as though Chert had asked him why he kept filling his lungs with air. "Nobody told me, Father. I saw it."

  As they approached the bridge Chert did his best to hide his face from everyone who passed. Market Road Bridge was a short, high-arching span that crossed the canal between the outer keep's two lagoons. Where the canal crossed a muddy field to join with the North Lagoon it made a small estuary, usually the home of many birds, but in this time of privations and with so many hungry folk packed into the castle, most of the birds had long since been caught and eaten. The torch on the bridge had gone out; the little patch of water and grass and sand lay silent and almost invisible on either side, even to the Funderling's keen eyes, as though they passed through a void between stars.

  On the far side of the bridge they stepped off the road and onto a small, almost invisible path of rough logs along the edge of the water. They proceeded along this dark track until they reached the dim glow of a fish-skin lantern hung from a pillar at the canal's edge. Continuing on and passing four more lights brought them to a largely empty section of Skimmer's Lagoon, but the last light, the fifth lantern, shone on more than just black water and the dockside path: a rickety gangway made of boards and rope stretched out from the pool of lantern light onto the dark lagoon and toward a dark, uneven shape pricked with a few smaller, reddish lights, like a campfire that had burned to embers. Small waves patted at the edge of the walkway near their feet.

  "What are we doing here?" Chert whispered. "How do you know this place? I will go no farther without some answers, boy."

  Flint looked at him, face pale in the fish-skin glow. Chert was suddenly frightened, not by the boy himself but by what he might say, what changes it might bring. But Flint only shook his head.

  "I can't give you answers, Father-I don't know them. I saw this place when I was asleep and I knew I had to come here. I know what I must do. You will have to trust me."

  Chert stared at the small face, so familiar and yet so unknowably foreign.

  "Very well, I'll trust you. But if I say we leave, we leave. Understood?"

  The boy did not reply, but turned and headed down the swaying gangway.

  The barge at the end of it was low but wide, its deck a clutter of cabins and outbuildings-it looked more like the floor of a storage room than any seaworthy vessel. Lights flickered in several of the tiny windows, but Flint headed unerringly toward a patch of absolute darkness on the side of the barge; by the time Chert caught up with him the boy had already rapped twice on the cabin door there.

  The door opened a crack. "What do you want?" a quiet voice asked.

  "To speak with your headman."

  "And who is it wants to speak with him?"

  "A messenger from Kioy-a-pous."

  Chert stared at the boy. Kioy-a-pous? Who or what was that? And what in the name of the Earth Elders was going on?

  The door swung open, spilling amber light. A Skimmer girl stood there, waiting for them to enter. Chert had never seen one of her tribe close up. Her solemn face looked just like some of the ancient carvings he'd seen beneath Funderling Town, which made no sense-why would the old Funderlings have carved pictures of Skimmers?

  The girl led them down a long, dark passage. Chert could feel the ship continuously moving beneath his feet, a most distressing sensation for someone who had lived all his life on stone. She took them into a low, wide cabin where half a dozen Skimmer men sat around a table whose height reflected the close-hanging roof: all the Skimmers sat on the floor, their knees bent and high. As they turned toward the newcomers the men's large, wide-set eyes and hairless faces made them look like a gathering of frogs in a pond.

  "My father, Turley Longfingers," the girl told Flint and Chert, gesturing toward one of the men, "He is the headman of our people here."

  "What is this, Daughter?" Turley seemed upset by this sudden intrusion-almost shamefaced, as though he and the others had been caught planning something wicked.

  "He says he comes as a messenger from Kioy-a-pous," she said. "Don't ask me more, for I can't tell you. I'll bring some drink." She shrugged, then made a sullen little curtsy to the men and left the cabin.

  "Why declare yourself
with such a name, young one?" Turley said. "You have the stink of the northern king on you-old Ynnir Graywind. We do not serve him or his dying master. Too many broken promises lie between our peoples. We are the children of Egye-Var, Lord of the Seas, so what do we care for Kioy-a-pous? What do we care for the one called Crooked?"

  Flint reacted very strangely to the Skimmer's words: for the first time since he and Opal had found the child in a sack beside the Shadowline he saw a look of fury cross the boy's face. It was a moment's expression only, a flash like the white smear of lightning across a dark sky, but in that instant Chert found himself truly afraid of the child he had brought into his home.

  "Those are old ideas, headman," Flint told the Skimmer, his anger gone again, or at least invisible. "Taking the side of one of the Great Ones against another-that is a strategy from when the world was young and mortals had no part but that which the Great Ones allowed them. Things have changed. Egye-Var and the rest were banished for a reason, and you and the other inheritors would not like it if they came back to reclaim what was theirs."

  "What do you mean?" the Skimmers' headman asked. "What have you come to tell us?"

  "It is not what I have come to tell you that is important, it is what I need to ask," the boy said with invincible calm. "Take me to the keepers of the Scale."

  The chief of the Skimmers was so startled he actually leaned back as though this odd child had struck him, his mouth working uselessly for a moment. "What… what do you speak of?" he demanded at last, but it sounded like weak bluster.

  "I speak of the two sisters, as you already know," Flint said. "Many things may depend on this. Take me to them, headman, and do not waste more time."

  Turley Longfingers looked helplessly at the other Skimmer men but they seemed even more taken aback than he was, their eyes bulging with anxious surprise.

  "We… we cannot do it," their chief said at last. Resistance was gone. His denial was an admission, not a refusal. "No shoal-mooted man may visit the sisters…"

  "They need to go and my Rafe isn't here," said the headman's daughter. "If you cannot take them, Father, I will."

  If Chert thought Turley Longfingers would rage at the girl, hit her or drive her from the room, he was wrong. Instead he sounded almost apologetic. "But, Daughter, this is not a day to approach the sisters… not a shriven day, no salt has been sprinkled…"

  "Nonsense, Father." She shook her head as if he were a child who had made a mess. "Listen! This child speaks of things no outsider knows, let alone any landlegged child. He speaks of the Scale! As if we did not already know that a time of change is upon us."

  "But, Ena, we do not…"

  "You may punish me later if you wish." She stood. "But I am taking them to the drying shed."

  This finally opened the floodgates: the other Skimmer men all began to talk at once, arguing, hissing, vying for Turley's attention, pointing their long fingers at the chieftain's daughter as though she had walked into the room naked. The noise swelled until Turley flapped his long hands for silence, but it was not his voice that stilled them.

  "Take us, then," said Flint. "We have no time to waste. It is less than a turn of the moon until Midsummer."

  "Follow me, then." Ignoring the looks of outrage and open befuddlement from the Skimmer men, the girl drew a shawl from a hook on the wall and draped it around her shoulders. "But walk carefully-some of the way is dangerous."

  To Chert's surprise, the girl led them no farther than the floating dock attached to the stern of the ramschackle barge. The moon had vanished somewhere behind the castle's outer walls and the night was so dark that but for the dull sparkle of stars when the wind blew the clouds aside, they might have been in one of the deepest tunnels of the Mysteries.

  Ena pointed to a rowboat bobbing beside the dock. "Get in."

  Chert thought there could be nothing more frightening than getting into a boat, with only air above him and water beneath him. He quickly found out he was wrong.

  "Now put this on," Ena told them, handing Chert and Flint a length of cloth each. "Tie it over your eyes."

  "Blind ourselves??" Chert was almost choking. "Are you mad?"

  "If you do not, I will not take you. The way to the drying shed is not for landleggers, even those who claim to serve Kioy-a-pous."

  "Please, Father," Flint said. "All will be well."

  Oh, certainly, Chert thought. Why not? Perhaps when we fall in the boy will charm the sharks, too, like one of the holy oracles. With great reluctance, he tied the stiff, salty rag over his eyes; a moment later he felt the boat beginning to move. What truly happened to this child behind the Shadowline-and when he went to the Shining Man?

  The Shining Man. Chert could not help thinking of how the boy had lain at the great figure's feet. Like the rest of his people, Chert had been taught that the Shining Man was the image of their creator, the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone. During the Mysteries it had even been hinted to him and the others crossing into adulthood that the great crystalline shape was somehow alive-that the power of their god lived inside it. So why had the boy struck off on his own to find it? And what had he done with that strange mirror-the one that Chert had later risked execution to deliver to the terrifying Qar woman? And just as important, what in the name of the Earth Elders was the boy up to now? Flint had questioned ancient Brother Sulphur until the old man had flown into a rage, and now he had demanded-and been permitted!-access to some treasure of the secretive Skimmers. Sisters, scales-Chert had no idea what any of it might mean, but he knew for a certainty that he had no more control of events than a man caught at the top of a rockslide: all he could do was hang on and pray…

  These thoughts and a hundred more flitted through his mind as the oars creaked and the waves splashed gently against the side of the boat. At some point they passed through a long tunnel, with echoes bouncing off the stone. When the echo dropped away again the water, which had been as mild as one would expect on a lagoon inside the castle walls, suddenly began to rock the boat so strongly that Chert began tugging at his blindfold in panic.

  "Don't!" said Ena. She sounded breathless, as though she was working hard. "Keep that cloth on you or I'll turn us around."

  "What's happening?"

  "Never you mind, Funderling. Just sit back."

  Chert felt Flint reach over and squeeze his arm, so he reluctantly left the rag across his eyes. What was going on? Were they on the open sea? But how would they have got out through the harbor and past the harbor chain? What about the besieging Qar? It didn't make sense.

  At last, after what seemed an hour or more on the water, the last half tossing and pitching in a very queasy way, Chert felt the prow of the boat bump up against something solid. The girl jumped out and helped them both up onto a dock, and from there onto dry land.

  "Keep the eye-cloths on," she said. "I'll tell you when to take 'em off."

  At last Chert heard a door open and he and Flint were led through, guided by Ena's careful, rough-skinned hands. Immediately his lungs and nostrils filled with harsh, salty smoke.

  "You can unbind your eyes now," she said.

  When he stopped coughing, Chert did. They were standing in what looked like some kind of upgrounder barn. A great fire roared in a stone pit in the room's center, flames twice as tall as Chert painting everything a dull red-orange. On either side of the fire long poles stretched from one end of the high-ceilinged, rectangular room to the other, supported every few paces with thicker, rough-hewn wooden pillars. On the poles hung hundreds of splayed fish carcasses.

  "By the Elders, it really is a drying shed," Chert murmured, then found himself coughing again from the smoke. His eyes were already stinging painfully.

  "Oh, who's there, who's there?" The voice, though quiet, seemed to speak right in his ear. He jumped and whirled around but saw only Ena and silent Flint-for all he could tell, it might have been the split carcasses of the fish that spoke. "Dear, dear, we seem to have frightened Papa Sprat." The invisible voice laughed, a
cracked bray. "Come here to us, darlings. Nothing to fear in the drying shed-unless you're a fish. Isn't that right, Meve?"

  Chert hesitated, but Flint was already walking toward the fire. As he made his way around the firepit Chert saw two small shapes sitting on a bench near the flames. One of them, an old Skimmer woman, rose as Flint approached. She was tiny, barely taller than Chert himself, and although all of the fisher-people had a little of the frog in their looks, this ancient creature was like one of the entombed toads or mudskippers the Funderlings sometimes discovered in the foundations of buildings they were excavating-a withered, seemingly lifeless creatures that nevertheless would recover if dipped in water, though it had been sleeping in the clay for centuries.

  "Good evening," said the ancient Skimmer woman. "Gulda I am, and here is my sweet sister Meve." Gulda gestured to the other figure, even smaller than she, huddled in a coarse robe with the hood pulled close, as if even beside the fire Meve felt uncomfortably cold. "She talks not as much as she once did, but what she says is wise-is that not right, my love?"

  "Wise," croaked the other woman without looking up.

  "And greetings to you, Turley's daughter," Gulda said to Ena. "You can wait with your sea-pony. The great ones have naught to say to you tonight, although doubtless they will another time."

  "Another time," Meve echoed in a dry rasp that suggested she had been in the smoky shed for a very long time indeed.

  Ena looked disappointed but did not argue. She made a curtsy to the sisters and walked to the door.

  "You are the keepers of the Scale," suggested Flint when the girl was gone.

  "And why wouldn't we be?" Gulda's leathery, pop-eyed face seemed almost merry, although there was an edge of irritation in her voice. "Given the lore by our mother, we were, and she by hers, stretching back since keels first ran on ground here-who else would keep it and polish it and know its secrets?"