The Stone of Farewell

by Tad Williams

  Finished stoking the fire, the children were huddled near the wall of the abbey. One of the youngest girls sat on the ground in her thin shift, sobbing quietly; an older boy patted her head in a perfunctory way that seemed meant to comfort her. They all watched Skodi’s movements with fascinated attention. The wind had blown the fire into a rippling pillar, which painted their sober little faces with vermillion light.

  “Now, where is Honsa?” Skodi called, clutching her nightdress closer to her body as she straightened up. “Honsa!?”

  “I’ll get her, Skodi,” Vren said. He slipped into the shadows at the corner of the abbey, vanishing from sight, then reappeared a few moments later with a black-haired Hyrka girl a year or two older than himself. A heavy basket swung between them, bumping and jostling across the uneven ground until they set it down by Skodi’s swollen feet and scampered back to the crowd of watching children. Once there, Vren squatted in front of the little group and pulled a knife from his belt, then began to nervously shred the end of his remaining hank of rope. Simon could feel the boy’s tension from across the yard. He wondered dully what the cause might be.

  Skodi reached into the basket and lifted out a skull whose mandible clung by only a few knots of dried flesh, so that the eyeless face seemed to gape in surprise. The bulging basket, Simon now saw, was full of skulls. He suddenly felt sure he knew what had happened to the parents of all these children. His numbed body shivered reflexively, but he perceived the movement only dimly, as though it happened to someone else who was some distance away. Nearby, dark-eyed Vren picked at the end of rope with his gleaming blade, his features set in a brooding scowl. Simon remembered with a sinking heart how Skodi had said that beside his other chores, Vren butchered and cooked for her.

  Skodi held the skull before her, her oddly pretty face utterly absorbed—a scholar studying a table of high mathematical formulae. She swayed from side to side like a boat in high wind, nightdress flapping, and began to sing in her high-pitched, childish voice.

  “In a hole, in a hole.”

  Skodi piped,“... in the ground, in a hole, where the wet-nosed mole

  sings a song of cold stone, and of mud and gray bone,

  a quiet, small song all the chill, dark night long

  as he digs in the deep, where the white worms creep,

  and the dead all sleep, with their eyes full of earth

  where the beetles give birth, laying little white eggs,

  and their brittle black legs go scrape, scrape, scrape,

  and the dark, like a cape, covers all just the same,

  darkness hiding their shame as it covered their names,

  the names of the dead, all gone, all fled,

  empty winds, empty heads,

  Above grass grows on stone, fields lie fallow, unsown

  all is gone that they’ve known

  so they wail in the deep, crying out in their sleep,

  without eyes, still they weep, calling out for what’s lost,

  in the darkness they toss, under pitweed and moss

  in the deeps of the grave, neither master or slave,

  has now feature or fame, needs knowledge or name,

  but they long to come back, and they stare through the cracks

  at the dim sun above, and they curse cruel love,

  and the peace lost in life, think of worry and strife,

  ruined child or wife,

  all the troubles that burned, dreadful lessons unlearned,

  still they long to return, to return, to return,

  they long to return.

  Return!

  In a hole, in the ground, under old barrow-mound, where skin, bone, and blood turn to jelly-soft mud, and the rotting world sings ...

  Skodi’s song went on and on, circling downward like a black whirlpool in a weed-strewn and unfrequented pond. Simon felt himself sinking with it, tugged by its insistent rhythms until the flames and the naked stars and the gleaming eyes of children blurred together into streaks of light, and his heart spiraled down into darkness. His mind could feel no connection with his shackled body, or with the actions of those around him. A bleak hiss of idiot noise filled his thoughts. Bleak shapes moved across the snowy courtyard, unimportant as ants.

  Now one of the shapes took the round, pale object in its hand and tossed it into the fire, throwing a fistful of powder in after it. A plume of scarlet smoke belched forth, trailing off into the sky and obscuring Simon’s view. When it cleared, the fire was burning as brightly as before, but a heavier darkness seemed to have settled over the courtyard. The red light that splashed the buildings had become subdued, old as sunset on a dying world. The wind had failed, but a deeper cold crept through the abbey’s grounds. Though his body was no longer fully his own, still Simon could feel the intense chill crawling right into his bones.

  “Come to me, Lady Silver Mask!” the largest of the figures cried. “Speak with me, Lord Red Eyes! I want to trade with you! I have a pretty thing you will like!”

  The wind had not returned, but the bonfire began to waver from side to side, bulging and shuddering like some great animal struggling inside a sack. The cold intensified. The stars dimmed. A shadowy mouth and two empty black eye-smudges formed in the flames.

  “I have a present for you!” the large one shouted gleefully. Simon, drifting, remembered that her name was Skodi. Several of the children were crying, voices muffled despite the curious stillness.

  The face in the fire contorted. A low, grumbling roar spilled from the yawning black mouth, slow and deep as the creaking of a mountain’s roots. If words were part of that drone, they were indistinguishable. A moment later, the features began to shimmer and fade.

  “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, Endë, 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-corner, 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 shrieked 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 his 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 go.

  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.