by Tad Williams
"I am so sorry, Lord…" He took the mirror from its leather bag and held it out to the blind king.
She still lives. The king's thoughts were soft as snowfall. His long fingers closed on the mirror and he held it up before his face as though he examined it with his blind eyes through the strip of cloth that covered them. A small frown crossed his face.
Something is wrong, he said quietly. Something is missing.
Barrick's insides went cold. "My lord?"
The king sighed. I expected more, manchild, even with the Artificer so close to his ending. Still, it does not matter. This age of the world comes down to what we hold here, whatever essence he has given us. We have no other choice but to use it and pray the flaw is not too great.
The blind king breathed on the mirror and then laid it against the queen's breast.
For a stretching moment nothing seemed to change. The chamber's inconstant light flickered silently; the very air seemed drawn tight like a held breath. Then the queen's face contorted in what seemed a grimace of pain and she gasped as she pulled in air. Her eyes-black eyes, startlingly dark and deep-sprang open for a moment and her gaze slid from Barrick to Ynnir, where it rested. Then, like a drowning swimmer who has come to the surface for one last breath before surrendering forever, she seemed to fall back. Her eyes fluttered and slid closed once more; her hand, which had moved toward her breast as if to touch the mirror, fell back on the bed.
Barrick felt as if he might weep, but the pain was too cold, too stony for tears. He had failed. Why had he or anyone else thought it might end differently?
The king bowed his head and for long moments knelt in silence beside the queen. Then he reached out a hand that shook only a little and lifted the mirror from her bosom. He held it up as if to examine it, then, shockingly, tossed away the thing that first Gyir, then Barrick had carried for so long. As it clattered across the room the walls erupted into movement, and for the first time Barrick saw that the gleaming scales that covered walls and ceiling were shimmering beetles, each wingcase flashing rainbows like a puddle of oil.
It has given her a few more hours, perhaps days, but there was not enough of our ancestor in the mirror to wake her, Ynnir said heavily. There is only one way left to me. Come, child of men. I must tell you of true and terrible things, then you must make a decision no creature of your race has ever been asked to make.
Whether the gods were always here, or whether they came to these lands from somewhere else entirely, we cannot know. Even Ynnir's thoughts came slowly, as if with great effort.
The two of them had returned to the room where Barrick had slept, and Barrick realized for the first time that with all these miles of castle to choose from, the humble little chamber was the king's own retiring room.
They say they always existed. Ynnir paused to drink from a cup of water, a strangely ordinary thing to do. None of us were alive so we cannot dispute what they say…
"The gods say they always existed?" Barrick was not sure that he had understood Ynnir.
That is what they told our ancestors. In fact, that is what Crooked himself, the father of my line, told the first generation of the Fireflower, although even Crooked could not have known for certain. He was born here, of course, during the Godwar.
Born here? What did the king mean, Barrick wondered. And why was Ynnir bothering to tell him all this if the mirror had failed-if Barrick himself had failed?
But whatever their birth, their source, the king went on, the gods were already here when the Firstborn arrived.
"The Firstborn-is that what you call your ancestors?"
And yours, child. Because once we were all the same people-the Firstborn. But one part of that race had the First Gift-the Changing, as some called it. The part that would become our people came from a trick of nature and our blood that allowed us many different shapes, many ways of living and being, while the rest of our Firstborn fellows-those were your people-were immutable in their bones and skin. So as time passed the two tribes began to grow apart until they were quite separate, my people and yours, and in some cases did not even remember their shared root. But shared it was, and is-that is why some of us, especially of my family, look so much like your kind. We have changed, but mostly on the inside. On the outside we have kept much of our original seeming.
Barrick thought he understood, at least enough to nod-but what astounding sacrilege the Trigonate church back home would name it!
Forgive me for sending this all to you on the wings of thought, Ynnir said, but it tires me less than speaking the way your kind does. He sighed. By the time that the Moonlord and Pale Daughter ran away together to his great house, beginning the Godwar, our two peoples were no longer separated simply by the First Gift. Most of your ancestors were in the southern continent, living near Mount Xandos, worshipping Thunderer and his brothers. Most of my people had settled here in the north around Moonlord's stronghold, and as a result, when Moonlord and his kin were besieged by the Thunderer's clan, we took the side of Moonlord and Whitefire…
"Moonlord, Pale Daughter… I… I don't know who these people are, Lord…" Barrick said.
Not people-gods. And you know them well, just not by our names. Call them Khors and Zoria, then, and Zoria's father Perin the Thunderer, who angrily laid siege to the lovers' moon-castle. So Khors called for help from his brother and sister, Zmeos and Zuriyal, who came to his defense. My people cast their lot with them, and even those of my ancestors who were far away came to join them here.
For a long moment, as Ynnir sat gathering his thoughts, Barrick did not understand the meaning of what he had heard. "Hold, please, my lord. Your ancestors came… here?"
Yes, this place is far older than my people, Ynnir said. The castle in which you sit, or rather the castle that lies beneath and behind the castle in which you sit, was once the domain of the god of the moon himself, Khors Silvergleam. When next you see the walls and the tall, proud towers, look not to the black stone we have built with, but look for the gleam of the moonstone beneath. A careful eye will see it.
Barrick could only stare around him. This strange castle-was it truly Everfrost, the dark fortress of all the stories?
Even the most ignorant of your people knows how that battle ended, although they do not know all the reasons, Ynnir continued. Khors was killed, his brother and sister banished from the earth. His wife-Perin's daughter, Zoria-escaped and wandered lost until at last she was found by Perin's brother Kernios, the dark master of the earth. He took her into his house and made her his wife-whether she wished it or not.
But she had a child during the war, of course-clever Kupilas, fathered by the Moonlord-and as he grew his gift for making things was such that although they mocked him and treated him brutally, Perin and the other Xandian gods took Kupilas back with them so they could have his skills at their service. He made many wonderful things for them…
"Like Earthstar, the spear of Kernios," said Barrick, remembering Skurn's tale.
Yes, and that particular weapon was both Crooked's glory and his doom, Ynnir said. But we do not speak of that yet. Still, the doom of the Fireflower-that which overwhelms us even now-was built in the ruins of the Godwar. Crooked escaped his captors at last. He traveled the world, teaching both your people and mine, learning more than any other man or god ever learned about the art of making things. And during those years he also learned how to walk the roads of the Void.
Barrick nodded, remembering another of the raven's strange stories. "His great-grandmother's roads."
Yes. And so he came at last and lived for a while among my people, here in the ruins of the moon-castle, and while he lived among us he fell in love with one of my ancestors, the maiden Summu. Those were days when gods and mortals shared the earth, and even had children together. But unlike most of his kind, Crooked-Kupilas-did not leave his offspring with only tales as a legacy. Summu had three children, two girls and one boy, and all of them were born with the gift we call the Fireflower. When Kupilas had gon
e on to fulfill his great and terrible destiny, it was discovered that his offspring were not as others of their tribe-life ran stronger in them. One of those children was Yasammez, the great dark lady you have met, who has lived all the ages since then, a life almost as long as that granted the gods themselves. Her brother and sister, Ayann and Yasudra, used the gift in a different way, although they did not at first know they had any gift to give. Although they lived no longer than those of our families usually do, a span that can be counted in a few centuries, their gift was not granted to them, but to their offspring.
Summu had been of the highest blood of our kind, so her eldest boy and girl, as was the tradition then and now, were married to each other to keep the line pure and strong. But these two, Ayann and Yasudra, passed the Fireflower along to their own children, and the gift it bestowed was that when Ayann and Yasudra were dead and their children ruled the People, their children had the parents' essence in them-not just their spirit or their blood, but their living essence and all their memories. The children then birthed children of their own, Ayann and Yasudra's grandchildren, and one day those two married and received the wisdom and thoughts of both their parents and grandparents. So it has gone ever since, the king and queen of our people each passing down all that he or she is to the next born. We are a living Deep Library, and so we have what we need to guard our children through the pain of the Long Defeat. The king nodded slowly. You do not know what that means, do you, manchild? We call it the Long Defeat because we Qar are too few ever to contest our once-cousins the mortal men for ownership of this world, so we know it is our fate to diminish and eventually be supplanted by your folk-although, again, I speak too simply of complicated things.
But here is where we come to the hard truths.
The Fireflower runs forever in Yassamez because she has not shared it. She has never taken one of her own blood for a lover, so she has not diminished the gift. Some say it is because she is selfish. Others call it the opposite, a sacrifice-they say she has accepted a painfully long life so that she may watch over the generations of her brother and sister's bloodline. But whatever the truth, Yasammez is what she is.
Those of us who received the Fireflower from our parents, and must pass it along in turn to our own offspring, have a more complicated path to walk. For one thing, each passing of the Fireflower, each passing of the memories of all the previous generations to the next, takes great strength. We cannot find such strength in ourselves alone-the cost is too great. There is only one place we can go to gain it. To Crooked himself-or rather, to the last trace of him remaining in this world.
This ultimate trace of the god stands beneath the castle your people call Southmarch, but which was once a doorway into the home of the Earthlord Kernios. It is the last true vestige of the terrible old days when all the gods walked the earth.
Most of your folk do not even know of it, but some who live in the depths beneath the castle do. They call it the Shining Man.
"I haven't… I do not know it, Lord."
But the drows of your family's castle do. They have worshipped and protected it for years without every knowing what it truly was.
"Drows? "
He waved his hand. You call them "Funderlings," I think. It matters not, because now we are at the crux of things.
For years the place you call Southmarch was occupied by men-warlords and petty nobles ruled it at the behest of other kings, and although we of the People's ruling family could not come there openly, we knew other ways to reach the Shining Man and gain the strength we needed to keep the Firef lower alive in our blood. My sister Saqri and I made the pilgrimage in the days of the empire in Syan. Our grandparents had been there when Hierosol ruled mankind. But then came the plague years and the humans drove us out of all their lands-lands which had been ours once, but in which we were now interlopers, objects of fear and hatred-and the most painful loss of all was the place you call Southmarch, where Crooked waited in the depths for us. We fought to keep our way to him open but were defeated, in large part by your ancestor Anglin, and forced to fall back to our lands in the north, where humans seldom walked.
Thus, when Saqri and I began to sicken with age, we could not pass the Fireflower to our son and daughter. A century went by and our plight became desperate. Yassamez, the elder sister of our entire line, counseled that we should make war on mankind to win back the castle, but I feared that we would lose such a contest and things would only be worse. My wife sided with our ancestress. For a long time our family was locked in dispute, until all of Qul-na-Qar was riven by it. At last, hiding their thoughts from their mother and from me, my son Janniya and his sister Sanasu set out themselves for Southmarch with only a small troop of household guards and retainers.
They were captured, though, and brought before Kellick, Anglin's heir, the ruler of the March Kingdom. Your ancestor Kellick saw Sanasu, my beautiful Sanasu… Here Ynnir stopped, and although his face did not change, the cessation of his quiet, calm thoughts in Barrick's head was as shocking as if the king had burst into tears… And he wanted her for his own, he continued at last. A mortal man coveted the one who would have become immortal queen of her entire people! And he took her, as a wolf takes a graceful deer, little caring what beauty is destroyed as long as his appetites are slaked…
This time the pause was more deliberate. Barrick, in a sort of helpless dream, watched the king's pale face harden into something even stonier than before.
He took her. Janniya, her brother, her intended-my son!-fought for her, but Kellick Eddon had many men. Janniya was… killed. Sanasu was taken. The Fireflower could not be passed to the son and daughter. The end of the people was at hand.
Queen Sanasu…! Barrick thought of her picture in the portrait hall, a face he knew well, strange, haunted eyes, fiery hair, and pale skin. But she… was married to the king of Southmarch! Could she truly have been one of the Qar?
In the wake of that terrible day, the king resumed, Yassamez and others of course brought war to the humans, and for a while even recaptured the place where Crooked had destroyed the last of the gods, but Kellick took my daughter Sanasu and retreated farther into the domains of men until he could find enough allies to fight back. While we owned the castle again, Saqri and I did what we could to strengthen our inner flames, but we knew that without heirs we only delayed the inevitable. Eventually the humans overwhelmed us and forced us back out again, slaughtering so many of our folk that we gave a great deal of our remaining strength to creating the Mantle, a cloak of twilight that would discourage men from following us into our lands. And so we have lived these last years.
Now the queen and I are both dying. I have loaned her what strength I could while we waited to see how this… he lifted up the mirror… gamble called the Pact of the Glass played out. But it is not enough. She will not wake again. Unless I give her what little I have left of myself. Unless I give her my life.
Barrick sat, shocked. "You would have to give your life for her? But that wouldn't help anything."
In any other situation that would be true, but the ways of the Fireflower are complicated and subtle. There might yet be a way to stave off the inevitable end of our line-at least for a little while longer. Perhaps that is what Yasammez thought when she sent you to me. I would like to think she had some intention other than to mock me.
"I… I don't understand, my lord."
Of course not-how could you? Your people have hidden the truth of what happened. But still, at times in your young life you must have wondered, perhaps sensed that something was… wrong…
Barrick was beginning to feel a chill now, as if fever was rolling through him. "Wrong with me? Are you talking about me?"
You, your father, and anyone else who has ever carried the painful, confusing legacy of the Fireflower as it burns in human veins. Yes, my child, I am talking about you. You are a descendant of my daughter, Sanasu, and the blood runs strong in you. In a way, you are my grandson.
Barrick stared at him
. His heart was pounding so swiftly that he felt dizzy. "I'm… one of the Twilight People?"
No, you are less than that… and also more. You have the blood of the Highest in you, but to this hour it has brought you only sorrow. Now, however, it might make you the last hope of our ancient people-but only if you make a great sacrifice. You can let me pass the Fireflower itself along to you.
Barrick could not make sense of it. He stared. The king's calm face looked just as it had looked an hour earlier, before he had said these things which turned all the world upside down. "You… you want to give this Fireflower to… to me? "
To keep the queen alive a little longer, I will need to lend her my last strength. If I can pass the Fireflower along to you-and it may not be possible-that legacy at least will survive. But even if you survive it, Barrick Eddon, you will never be remotely the same again.
"But if you do that, what… what will happen to you?"
For the first time in a long while, Ynnir smiled-a thin, weary tightening of the lips. Oh, child, of course I will die.
35
Rings, Clubs, and Knives
"The fairies killed in the great battle at Coldgray Moor were buried in a common grave. Although the local inhabitants shun the place and claim it is haunted by the vengeful spirits of dead Qar, and I was unable to locate the grave precisely, the general area is now a beautiful, flowering meadow."
-from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand"
They had to stop at the outskirts of Ugenion because the Royal Highway was blocked by a funeral procession bound for the temple in the city. It was clearly a rich man's leavetaking: four horses pulled a wagon bearing the black-draped coffin, and so many mourners followed it that Briony climbed out of the wagon and joined the other players by the roadside.