by Tad Williams
They drove through the door moments ahead of the attackers, and Isorn and two of the other pursuers rammed it shut. Spears crashed against the heavy wood; a moment later one of the Norns called out in a high-pitched, clicking voice.
“Axes!” Jarnauga said. “I know that much of the Hikeda’ya tongue. They are going for axes.
“Strangyeard!” Josua shouted, “where is the damned passageway?”
“It’s…it’s so dark,” the priest quavered. Indeed, the room was lit only by the inconstant light of orange flames beginning to burn through the roofbeams. Smoke was gathering beneath the low ceiling. “I…I think it is on the south side…” he began. Einskaldir and several others sprang to the wall and began pulling down the heavy arrases.
“The door!” Einskaldir barked. “Locked,” he added a moment later.
The keyhole in the heavy wooden door was empty. Josua stared for a moment, even as a sliver of axe-blade crashed through the door from the courtyard outside. “Break it down,” he said. “You others, pile what you can before the other door.”
In a matter of moments Einskaldir and Isorn had hacked the bolt right out of the jamb, while Deornoth lifted an unlit torch to the smoldering ceiling. An instant later the door was knocked off its hinges and they were through, fleeing up the sloping corridor. Another piece splintered out of the door behind them.
They ran for several furlongs, the stronger helping the weaker. One of the courtiers at last fell weeping to the ground, unable to go farther. Isorn went to pick him up, but his mother Gutrun, herself staggeringly tired, waved him off.
“Leave him lie,” she said. “He can keep up.”
Isorn looked hard at her, then shrugged. As they continued up the slanting stone pathway, they heard the man struggle to his feet, cursing them, and follow.
Even as the doors loomed before them, swart and solid in the light of the solitary torch, extending from the floor of the passageway to the roof, the sound of pursuit came echoing up behind them. Fearing the worst, Josua stretched out his hand to one of the iron rings and pulled. The door swung inward with a soft groan of its hinges.
“Usires be praised,” Isorn said.
“Get the women and others through,” Josua ordered, and a moment later two of the soldiers had led them well up the passageway beyond the mighty doors.
“Now we come to it,” Josua said. “Either we must find some way to seal this door, or else we must leave enough men behind to slow our pursuers.
“I will stay,” Einskaldir growled. “I have tasted faerie-blood tonight. I would not mind more.” He patted his hilt.
“No. It is for me, and me alone.” Jarnauga coughed and sagged on Strangyeard’s arm, then straightened. The tall priest turned to look at the old man, and suddenly understood.
“I am dying,” Jarnauga said. “I was not meant to leave Naglimund. I always knew that. You need only leave me a sword.”
“You have not the strength!” Einskaldir said angrily, as if disappointed.
“I have enough to close this door,” the old man said gently. “See?” He pointed to the great hinges. “They are wrought very fine.
Once the door is shut, a blade broken off in the hinge-crevice will balk the stoutest pursuer. Go.”
The prince turned as if to object; a clicking shout reverberated up the passageway. “Very well,” he said softly. “God bless you, old man.”
“No need,” Jarnauga said. He pulled something shiny from around his neck and pressed it into Strangyeard’s hand. “Strange to make a friend at the very last,” Jarnauga said. The priest’s eye filled with tears, and he kissed the Rimmersman’s cheek.
“My friend,” he whispered, and went through the open door.
The last they saw was Jarnauga’s bright gaze catch the torchlight as he put his shoulder to the door. It swung closed, damping the sounds of pursuit. The bolts inside slid solidly into place.
After climbing a long stairway they emerged at last into the windy, ram-lashed evening. The storm had thinned, and as they stood on the naked hillside below the wooded Stile they could see fire flickering in the ruins of Naglimund below, and black, inhuman shapes dancing among the vaulting flames.
Josua stood and stared for a long while, sooty face streaked by the rain. His small party huddled trembling behind him, waiting to take to the path once more.
The prince raised his left fist.
“Elias!” he shouted, and the wind whipped the echoes away. “You have brought death and worse to our father’s kingdom! You have raised an ancient evil, and shattered the High King’s Ward! You have unhoused me, and destroyed much that I loved.” He stopped and fought back tears. “Now you are king no longer! I will take the crown from you. I will take it, I swear!”
Deornoth took his elbow and led him away from the pathway’s edge. Josua’s subjects stood waiting for him, cold and frightened, homeless in the wild Wealdhelm. He bowed his head for a moment, in weariness or prayer, and led them into the darkness.
44
Blood and the Spinning World
The dragon’s black blood had spilled over him, burning like afire. In the instant of its touch he had felt his own life subdued. The dreadful essence coursed through him. scalding away his spirit, and leaving only dragon-life. It was as if he had himself become—in the failing moment before darkness came—the Worm’s secret heart.
Igjarjuk’s smolderingly slow and intricate life captured him. He spread; he changed, and the changing was as painful as both death and birth.
His bones became heavy, solid as stone and curvingly reptilian. His skin hardened into gemlike scales, and he felt his pelt sliding on his back like a mailshirt of diamonds.
The dragon’s heartblood now moved powerfully in his breast, ponderous as the movement of a dark star in the empty night, strong and hot as the very forge-fires of the earth. His claws sank into the world’s stony skin, and his age-old heart pulsed…and pulsed…and pulsed…He grew into the brittle, ancient cleverness of the dragonfolk, feeling first the birth of his long-lived race in the earth’s infant days, then the weight of uncountable years pressing upon him, dark millennia rushing by like roiling waters. He was one of the Eldest of all races, one of the cooling earth’s firstborn, and he lay coiled beneath the world’s surface as the least of worms might lie hidden in the rind of an apple…
The old black blood raced through him. Still he grew, and he perceived and named all things of the spinning world. Its skin. the earth’s skin, became his own—the crawling surface of which all living things were born, where they struggled and failed, surrendering at last to become a part of him once more. Its bones were his bones, the rocky pillars on which all things stood, and through which he felt every tremor of breathing life.
He was Simon. Yet he was the serpent. And he was nevertheless the very earth in its infinitude and detail. And still he grew, and growing, felt his mortal life slipping away…
In the sudden loneliness of his majesty, fearing that he would lose everything, he reached out to touch those he had known. He could feel their warm lives, sensing them like sparks in a great, windy darkness. So many lives—so important, so small…
He saw Rachel—bent, old. She sat on a stool in an empty room, holding her gray head in her hands. When had she become so small? A broom lay at her feet, an orderly mound of dust beside it. The castle room was fast darkening.
Prince Josua stood on a hillside, looking down. A faint flame-hued light painted his grim face. He could see Josua’s doubt and pain; he tried to reach out and give him reassurance, but these lives were only to see, not to touch.
A small brown man he did not know poled his flat boat up a stream. Great trees dangled their branches in the water, and clouds of midges hovered. The little man patted protectively at a sheaf of parchment tucked into his belt. A breeze rattled the trailing branches, and the little man smiled gratefully.
A large man—Isgrimnur? Where was his beard?—paced on a weather-warped pier and stared out at the darkening
sky, at the windlashed ocean.
A beautiful old man, his long white hair tangled, sat playing with a crowd of half-naked children. His blue eyes were mild, distant, wrinkled in a happy squint.
Miriamele, hair close-cropped, looked out from the rail of a ship at the heavy clouds massing on the horizon. The sails snapped and rippled above her head. He wanted to watch her for a longer time, but the vision whirled away like a falling leaf.
A tall Hernystiri woman dressed in black kneeled before two cairns of stones in a grove of slender birch trees, high on the side of a windswept mountain.
King Elias stared into the depth of a wine cup, eyes red-rimmed. Sorrow lay across his knees. The gray sword was a wild thing feigning sleep…
Morgenes suddenly appeared before him, crowned in flame; and the sight drove an icy spear of pain even into his dragon’s heart. The old man was holding a great book, and his lips moved in anguished. silent cries, as though he shouted a warning…beware the false messenger…beware…
The faces slipped away, but for one last ghost.
A boy, thin and awkward, made his way through dark tunnels beneath the earth, crying and crawling through the labyrinth like a trapped insect. Every detail, every twist and turn unwound tortuously before his eyes.
The boy stood on a hillside beneath the moon. staring in horror at white-faced figures and a gray sword, but a dark cloud covered the boy in shadow.
The same boy, older now, stood before a great white tower. A golden light flashed on his finger, although the boy stood in deep and darkening shadow. Bells were tolling, and the roof had burst into flames…
Darkness was engulfing him now, pulling him away toward other, stranger places—but he did not wish to go on to those places. Not until he remembered the name of that child, that gawky boy who labored in ignorance. He would not go on; he would remember…
The boy’s name was…the boy’s name was…Simon!
Simon.
And then his sight faded…
“Seoman,” the voice said, quite loud now; he realized it had been calling him for some time.
He opened his eyes. The colors were so intense he quickly shut them, blinded. Spinning wheels of silver and red danced before the darkness of his closed lids.
“Come, Seoman, come and rejoin your companions. There is need of you here.”
He unlidded halfway, letting himself grow used to the light. There were now no colors at all—everything was white. He groaned, trying to move, and felt a terrible weakness, as though some heavy thing pressed down on him all around; at the same time he felt himself as transparent and fragile as if he were spun from pure glass. Even with closed eyes he thought he could feel light passing through him, filling him with a radiance that brought no warmth.
A shadow crossed his sensitive face, seeming almost to have tangible weight. Something wet and cold touched his lips. He swallowed, felt a bite of pain, coughed, and drank again. It seemed he could taste everywhere the water had ever been—the icy peak, the swollen rain cloud, the stony mountain sluice.
He opened his eyes wider. All was indeed overwhelmingly white, except for the golden face of Jiriki looming nearby. He was in a cave, the walls pale with ash but for the traces of faint lines; furs and wooden carvings and decorated bowls were stacked along the edge of the stone floor. Simon’s heavy hands, numb yet strangely acute, clutched at the fur coverlet and probed weakly at the wooden cot on which he lay. How…?
“I…” He coughed again.
“You are sore, you are tired. That is expected.” The Sitha frowned, but his luminous eyes did not change expression. “You have done a very terrible thing, Simon, do you know? You have saved my life twice.”
“Mmmmm.” His head was responding as slowly as his muscles. What exactly had happened? There had been the mountain…the cave…and the…
“The dragon!” Simon said, choking, and tried to sit up. As the fur robe slid down he felt the chill of the room in earnest. Light was leaking past a skin hanging at the room’s far end. A wave of dizziness left him limp, and set his head and face to throbbing. He sagged back.
“Gone,” Jiriki said shortly. “Dead or not I do not know, but gone. When you struck, it tumbled past you and down into the abyss. I could not mark where it fell in the snows and ice of the great deeps. You wielded the sword Thorn like a warrior true, Seoman Snowlock.”
“I…” He took a shaky breath and tried again. Talking made his face hurt. “I don’t think…it was me. Thorn…used me. It…wanted to be saved, I think. That must sound foolish, but…”
“No. I think you may be correct. Look.” Jiriki pointed to the cave wall a few feet away. Thorn lay cushioned there on the prince’s cloak, black and remote as the bottom of a well. Could such a thing have ever felt alive in his hand? “It was easy enough to carry here,” Jiriki said, “perhaps this was a direction it wished to go.”
The Sitha’s words set in motion a slow wheel of thought in Simon’s mind.
The sword wanted to come here—but where is here? And how did we get…Oh, Mother of God, the dragon…!
“Jiriki!” he gasped, “the others! Where are the others?”
The prince nodded gently. “Ah, yes. I had hoped to wait longer, but I see I have no choice.” He closed his wide, bright eyes for a moment.
“An’nai and Grimmric are dead. They have been buried on the mountain Urmsheim.” He sighed, and made a complicated gesture with his hands. “You do not know what it means to bury a mortal and a Sitha together, Seoman. It has been seldom done, and never in five centuries. An’nai’s deeds will live until world’s end in the Dance of Years, the annals of our people, and Grimmric’s name will now live with his. They will lie forever beneath the Uduntree.” Jiriki closed his eyes and sat for a silent moment. “The others…well, they have all survived.”
Simon felt a clutch at his heart, but pushed away thoughts of the fallen pair for later. He stared at the ash-painted ceiling, and saw that the lines were faint scribings of great serpents and long-tusked beasts, winding all across the roof and walls. The blank eyes of the creatures troubled him: when he looked too long, they seemed to move. He turned back to the Sitha.
“Where’s Binabik?” he asked. “I want to speak to him. I had the strangest dream…the strangest dream…”
Before Jiriki could speak, Haestan poked his head in through the cave mouth. “Th’king doesn’t want t’talk,” he said, then saw Simon. “Y’r up, lad!” he crowed. “That’s fine!”
“What king?” Simon asked, confused. “Not Elias, I hope?”
“No, lad,” Haestan shook his head. “After…after what happened up on the mountain, th’trolls found us. You were sleepin’ for some days. We’re on Mintahoq, now—the troll-mountain.”
“And Binabik is with his family?”
“Not quite.” Haestan looked at Jiriki. The Sitha nodded. “Binabik—Sludig, too—th’king’s holdin’ them for prisoners. Under sentence o’ death, some say.”
“What!? Prisoners?!” Simon exploded, then sagged back down as a band of pain tightened cruelly around his head. “Why?”
“Sludig because he is a hated Rimmersman,” Jiriki said. “Binabik, they say, has committed some terrible crime against the troll-king. We do not know yet what it is, Seoman Snowlock.”
Simon shook his head in amazement. “This is madness. I’ve gone mad, or I’m still dreaming.” He turned accusingly to Jiriki. “And why do you keep calling me that name?”
“Don’t…” Haestan began, but Jiriki ignored him, producing instead from within his jacket the looking glass. Simon sat up and took it, the fine carvings on its frame rough to his sensitive fingers. The wind howled outside the cave, and cold air crept in below the door-cloth.
Was all the world covered with ice, now? Would he never again escape the winter?
In other circumstances he would have been quite taken with the reddish golden whiskers which were coming in thickly all over his face, but his attention was captured by the long scar running
up from his jaw, over his cheek and past his left eye. The surrounding skin was livid and new-looking. He touched it and winced, then slid his fingers up to his scalp.
A long swath of his hair had turned as white as the Urmsheim snows.
“You have been marked, Seoman.” Jiriki reached out and touched his cheek with a long finger. “For better or for worse, you have been marked.”
Simon let the mirror drop, and covered his face with his hands.
Appendix
PEOPLE
Erkynlanders
Barnabas—Hayholt chapel sexton
Beornoth—one of Jack Mundwode’s mythical band
Breyugar—Count of the Westfold, Lord Constable of the Hayholt under Elias
Caleb—Shem Horsegroom’s apprentice
Colmund—Camaris’ squire, later baron of Rodstanby
Deorhelm—soldier at Dragon and Fisherman
Deornoth, Sir—Josua’s knight, sometimes called “Prince’s Right Hand”
Dreosan, Father—chaplain of Hayholt
Eadgram, Sir—Lord Constable of Naglimund
Eahlferend—Simon’s fisherman father, husband of Susanna
Eahlstan Fiskerne—Fisher King, first Erkynlandish master of Hayholt
Eglaf, Brother—Naglimund monk, friend of Strangyeard
Elias—Prince, Prester John’s elder son, later High King
Elispeth—midwife at Hayholt
Ethelbearn—soldier, Simon’s companion on journey from Naglimund
Ethelferth—Lord of Tinsett