by Tad Williams
The soft words at last were gone. The speaking stone dimmed to a smear of pale light before Maegwin’s eyes. “I could not help her, Eolair.” She felt quite empty. “We did nothing. And she was so sad!”
Eolair gently released her from his grasp. “We do not understand enough to help anyone, Lady,” he said softly. “We are in need of help ourselves.”
Maegwin stepped away from him, fighting back angry tears. Hadn’t he felt the woman’s goodness, her sorrow? Maegwin felt as though she had watched a wonderful bird thrashing in a trap just beyond her reach.
Turning to Eolair, she was startled to see moving sparks in the darkness beyond. She blinked, but it was no phantasm of her dazzled eyes. A procession of dim lights was moving toward them, wending its way down the aisles of the shadowed arena.
Eolair followed her stare. “Murhagh’s Shield!” he swore, “I knew I was right to mistrust this place!” He fumbled for his sword hilt. “Behind me, Maegwin!”
“Hide from those who will save us?” She darted around his restraining hand as the bobbing lights approached. “It is the Sithi at last!” The lights, pink and white, wavered like fireflies as she took a step forward. “Peaceful Ones!” she cried. “Your old allies need you!”
The words that whispered out of the shadows came from no mortal throat. Maegwin was filled with wild excitement, certain now that her dreams had spoken truly. The new voice spoke an antique Hernystiri that had not been heard beneath the sunlight for centuries. Oddly, there seemed also a touch of fear in its words.
“Our allies are gone to bones and dust, now, as with most of our folk. What kind of creatures be you, that fear not the Shard?”
The speaker and his fellows slowly came forward into the light. Maegwin, who had thought herself ready for anything, felt as though the bedrock swayed beneath her. She clutched at Eolair’s sword arm as the Count of Nad Mullach hissed in surprise.
It was their eyes that seemed so strange at first, great round eyes with no whites. Blinking in the lampglare, the four newcomers seemed frightened creatures of the forest night. Man-tall but achingly slender, they clutched shining rods of some translucent gemstone in their long, spidery fingers. Fine, pale hair hung down around their bony faces; their features were delicate, but they wore rough clothes of fur and dusty leather, knobbed at knees and elbows.
Eolair’s sword rasped out of the scabbard, gleaming pinkly in the light of the crystal rods. “Stand back! What are you?”
The being nearest took a step backward, then drew up, its thin face evidencing nervous surprise. “But it is you who be trespassers here. Ah, you do be Children of Hern, as we did suspect. Mortals. He turned and said something to his fellows in a language like a murmur of song. They nodded gravely, then all four pairs of saucer eyes turned to Maegwin and Eolair once more. ”No, we have spoken on this, and only meet it is that you make shift to name yourselves.”
Marveling at how the dream had turned, Maegwin steadied herself on Eolair’s arm and spoke. “We ... we are ... I am Maegwin, daughter of King Lluth. This is Eolair, Count of Nad Mullach.”
The strange creatures’ heads bobbled on their slender necks; they spoke melodically among themselves once more. Maegwin and the count shared a look of stunned disbelief, then turned as the one who had spoken before made a discreet noise in his throat.
“You speak with good grace. So, be you gentlefolk among your kind, in truth? And promise you mean no harm? Sadly, it has been long since we have had dealings with Hern’s Folk, and we are sore ignorant of their doings. We were affrighted when you spoke to the Shard.”
Eolair swallowed. “Who are you? And what is this place?”
The leader stared at him for a long moment, the reflection of the lamp-flame bright in his great eyes. “Yis-fidri am I. My companions hight Sho-vennae, Imai-an, and Yis-hadra, who is my good wife.” They bowed their heads in turn as he named them. “This city is called Mezutu’a.”
Maegwin was fascinated by Yis-fidri and his friends, but a nagging doubt was making itself felt at the back of her mind. They were certainly strange, but they were not what she had expected....
“You cannot be the Sithi,” she said. “Where are they? Are you their servants?”
The strangers looked at her with alarm on their wide-eyed faces, then took a few pattering steps backward and joined briefly in chiming colloquy. After a moment, Yis-fidri turned and spoke a little more harshly than he had before.
“We served others once, but that was long ages agone. Have they sent you for us? We will not go back.” For all his defiant tone, there was something tremendously pathetic in Yis-fidri’s wagging head and huge, mournful eyes. “What did the Shard tell you?”
Eolair shook his head, confused. “Forgive us if we are rude, but we have never seen any like you. We were not sent to look for you. We did not even know you existed.”
“The Shard? Do you mean the stone?” Maegwin asked. “It said many things. I will try to remember them. But who are you then, if you are not the Sithi?”
Yis-fidri did not answer, but slowly lifted his crystal, extending his spindly hand until the rod’s rosy light burned heatlessly beside Maegwin’s face. “By your aspect, Hern’s people stand not so much changed since we Tinukeda’ya of the mountains last knew them,” he said wistfully. “How is it we are forgotten already—have so many generations of mortals come and gone? Surely it was only a few turnings of the earth since your northern tribesmen, the bearded ones, did know us?” His thin face grew distant. “The northerners called us Dvernings, and brought us gifts so we would craft for them.”
Eolair stepped forward. “You are the ones our ancestors called Domhaini? But we thought they were legend only, or at least were long dead. You are ... the dwarrows?”
Yis-fidri showed a mild frown. “Legend? You do be of Hern’s folk, be you not? Who was it, think you, that taught your ancestors to mine these mountains in days agone? We did. As to names, what matter? Dwarrow to some mortals, Dverning or Domhaini to others.” He waved his long fingers, slowly, sadly. “Only words. We are Tinukeda’ya. We came from the Garden and we can never return.”
Eolair sheathed his sword with a clang that echoed through the cavern. “You sought for the Peaceful Ones, Princess! This is as strange or stranger! A city in the mountain’s heart! The dwarrows out of our oldest legends! Has the world below gone as mad as the world above?”
Maegwin was scarcely less astonished than Eolair, but found herself with little to say. As she stared at the dwarrows, she mourned; the black cloud that had lifted for a while seemed to roll back over her mind.
“But you are not the Sithi,” she said at last, voice flat. “They are not here. They will not help us.”
Yis-fidri’s companions moved up, so that they formed a semicircle around the huddled pair. Watching Maegwin and Eolair worriedly, the wide-eyed dwarrows seemed poised to bolt.
“If you came searching for the Zida’ya—those who you name Sithi,” Yis-fidri said carefully, “then that is of deep interest to us indeed, since we brought us here to hide from them.” He nodded slowly. “Long ago did we refuse to bend any longer to their will, to their overweening injustice, and so we escaped. We thought they had forgotten us, but they have not. Now that we are weary and few, they seek to capture us once more.” A dim fire was kindled in Yis-fidri’s eyes. “They even call to us through the Shard, the Witness which has been silent for many long years. They mock us with their tricks, trying to lure us back.”
“You are hiding from the Sithi?” Eolair asked, confused. “But why?”
“We did serve them once, Hern’s Child. We fled. Now they would cozen us into coming back. They speak of swords to lure us—for they know that such crafting was always our delight, and the Great Swords some of our highest works. They ask us of mortals we have never met nor heard of—and what would we have to do with mortals now? You are the first we have seen in a long age.”
The Count of Nad Mullach waited for Yis-Fidri to continue. When it appear
ed he would not, Eolair asked: “Mortals? Like us? What mortals do they name to you?”
“The Zida‘ya woman—First Grandmother, as she is called—spoke several times of ...” the dwarrow conferred briefly with his fellows, “... of Handless Josua.’ ”
“Handless... ! Gods of earth and stream, do you mean Josua Lackhand?!” Eolair stared, astounded. “Oh, heaven, this is madness!” He sat down heavily on one of the decaying benches.
Maegwin slumped beside him. Her mind was already reeling beneath such weariness and disappointment that she had no strength left to be surprised, but when she at last turned away from the mild, wide eyes of the puzzled dwarrows to look to Eolair, the count’s face was that of a man struck by lightning in his own house.
Simon awakened from a flight through black spaces and screaming winds. The howling continued, but a red light bloomed before his eyes as the darkness receded.
“Vren, you little fool!” someone was shrieking close by. “There is blood in the circle!”
When he tried to take a breath, Simon felt something pushing down on him, so that his lungs had to strain for air. He wondered briefly if a roof had fallen on him. Fire? The red light danced and billowed. Was the Hayholt on fire?
He could see a vast shape now, dressed in flapping white. The figure seemed to have grown tall as the trees, looming far into the sky. It took long moments before he realized he was lying on the icy ground, that Skodi was standing over him, screaming at someone. How long... ?
The little boy Vren flailed on the ground a few cubits away, his hands holding his throat, eyes bulging in his dark face. Untouched and unapproached, he was kicking his feet wildly, heels drumming on the frozen mud. Somewhere nearby, Qantaqa was mournfully howling.
“You are bad!” Skodi screamed, her face gone pinkish-purple with rage. “Bad Vren! Spilled blood! They will swarm! Bad!” She gasped in a great breath and bellowed. “Punishment!” The little boy writhed like a smashed snake.
Beyond Skodi, a shadowy face watched from the center of the rippling fire, its unstable mouth moving in laughter. A moment later the bottomless black eyes settled on Simon, their sudden touch like an icy tongue pressed against his face. He tried to scream, but some great weight was pushing on his back.
Little fly, a voice whispered in his head, heavy and dark as mud. It was a voice that had haunted many dreams, a voice of red eyes and burning darkness. We meet you in the strangest places ... and you have that sword, as well. We must tell the master about you. He will be very interested. There was a pause; the thing in the fire seemed to grow larger, the eyes cold black pits in the heart of an inferno. Why, look at you, manchild, it purred, you are bleeding....
Simon drew his shaking hand out from beneath his body, wondering why it seemed strange that it should respond to his will. When he disentangled it from Thorn’s hilt, he saw that the trembling fingers were indeed covered with slick red blood.
“Punished!” Skodi was shrieking, her childlike voice cracking. “Everyone will be punished! We were to give presents to the Lord and Lady!” The wolf howled again, closer.
Vren had gone limp, facedown in the mud at Skodi’s feet. As Simon stared distractedly, the ground seemed to bulge, obscuring his view of the boy’s pale, crumpled form. A moment later another bulge appeared close by, quivering; the half-thawed earth parted with a crunching, sucking sound. A thin dark arm and long-nailed hand lifted from the agitated soil, reaching toward the dim stars with fingers spread like the petals of a black flower. Another hand snaked up beside it, followed by a pale-eyed head scarcely bigger than an apple. A needle-toothed grin split the wizened face, twitching the scraggly black whiskers.
Simon squirmed, unable to cry out. A dozen bulges blistered the earth of the courtyard, then a dozen more. In a moment the diggers were seething up from below like maggots from a burst carcass.
“Bukken!” Skodi shrilled in alarm. “Bukken! Vren, you little fool, I told you not to spill blood in the charm-circle!” She waved her fat arms at the diggers, who swarmed over the shrieking children like a plague of chittering rats. “I punished him!” she screamed, pointing at the unmoving child. “Go away!” She turned to the bonfire. “Make them go away, Sir! Make them go away!”
The fire fluttered in the chill wind, but the face only watched.
“Help! Simon!” Binabik’s voice was hoarse with fear. “Help us! We are still tied!”
Simon rolled over painfully, trying to pull his knees beneath him. His back was clenched in an immovable knot, as though he had been kicked by a horse. The air before his eyes seemed full of shining snowflakes.
“Binabik!” he groaned. A wave of squealing black shapes split off from the main cluster, flowing away from the children and toward the abbey wall where Sludig and the troll lay.
“Stop! I will make you!” Skodi had clamped her hands over her ears, as though to shield herself from the children’s pitiful screams. A small foot, pallid as a mushroom, emerged briefly from the knot of diggers, then was swallowed up again. “Stop!”
The ground suddenly erupted all about her, gouts of gelatinous mud spattering her nightdress. A flurry of spidery arms wrapped around her broad calves, then a swarm of diggers were climbing her legs as though they were tree trunks. Her nightdress bulged as they swarmed up beneath it in ever-increasing numbers, until at last the thin fabric split like an overstuffed bag, revealing a squirming mass of eyes and scrawny legs and taloned hands that almost completely obscured her doughy flesh. Skodi’s mouth pulled wide to scream and a serpentine arm pushed into it, disappearing to the shoulder. The girl’s pale eyes bulged.
Simon had finally dragged himself into a half-crouch when a gray shape flashed past him, bowling into the slithering, squeaking mass that had been Skodi and tumbling it to the ground. The diggers’ mewing cries rose in pitch, quickly becoming trills of fear as Qantaqa snapped necks and crushed skulls, throwing small bodies in the air with gleeful abandon. A moment later she was through and racing toward the throng of creatures that had descended on Binabik and Sludig.
The fire had flared up to a great height. The unformed thing within it laughed. Simon’s could feel its terrible amusement sapping him, sucking the life from him.
This is amusing, little fly, is it not? Why don’t you come closer and we will watch together.
Simon tried to ignore the pull of the voice, the insistent power of its words. He clambered agonizingly to his feet and staggered away from the fire and the thing that lurked within it. He used Thorn as a crutch, propping himself, though the hilt slid treacherously beneath his blood-damped hand. The slash Vren had made across his back was a cold ache, a numbness that was still somehow painful.
The thing Skodi had summoned continued to taunt him, its voice echoing inside his head, playing with him like a cruel child with a captured insect.
Little fly, where are you going? Come here. The master will want to meet you....
It was a terrible struggle to keep walking in the other direction; life seemed to be running out of him like sand. The diggers’ squeals and Qantaqa’s wet, joyful growl had become no more than a faint roaring in his ears.
For a long moment he did not even notice the talons grasping at his legs; when at last he looked down into the spider-egg eyes of the Bukken, it was as though he stared through a window into some other world, a horrible place that was fortuitously separated from his own. It was not until the scrabbling claws began to shred the legs of his breeches and score the flesh beneath that the dreamlike state fell away. With a shout of horror, he smashed the wrinkled face with a balled fist. More were climbing his legs. He kicked them away with moans of disgust, but they seemed as numberless as termites.
Thorn shivered again in his hands. Without thinking, Simon lifted it and sent the black blade whistling into a clump of prancing creatures. He felt it hum, as though it sang silently. Grown marvelously light, Thorn sheared heads and arms like grass stems until dark ichor ran down the bladed in streams. Every swing sent fiery pain lancing
through Simon’s back, but at the same time he felt mad exhilaration course though him. Long moments after all the diggers around him had died or fled, he was still hacking at the tangled corpses.
My, you are a fierce fly, aren’t you? Come to us. The voice seemed to reach into his head as into an open wound, and he squirmed in disgust. Tonight is a great night, a wild night.
“Simon!” Binabik’s muffled cry at last cut through his frenzy of hatred. “Simon! Unbind us!”
You know we will win, little fly. Even at this instant, far away in the south, one of your greatest allies falls ... despairs ... dies ...
Simon turned and staggered toward the troll. Qantaqa, her muzzle blood-washed to the ears, was keeping a hopping, shrilling throng of diggers at bay. Simon lifted Thorn once more and began to cut his way through the Bukken, smashing them down in bunches until at last they scattered from his path. The voice in his head seemed to be crooning almost wordlessly. The fire-washed courtyard shimmered before his eyes.
He bent to cut the troll’s bonds and a great wave of dizziness almost toppled him to the ground. Binabik rubbed the rope against Thorn’s cutting edge for a moment until the pieces fell aside. The little man tried briefly to rub life back into his wrists, then turned to Sludig. After picking at the knot for a moment, he turned to Simon.
“Here, lend your sword to this cutting,” he began, then stared. “Chukku’s Stones! Simon, you are all of blood on your back!”