(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch

by Tad Williams

  “Which is to say you will not answer that question outright, since you have so prettily painted the picture of it already without having to show yourself mean-spirited. But if you feel that way, I must suppose you would also believe he could be the murderer of my brother.”

  Dawet looked a little surprised. “Has he not confessed it? Someone told me that he had. I thought you prodded me about my innocence in your brother’s death only to see whether because I was his countryman I was also his confederate. But I assure you, my lady, find any Tuani beyond infancy and he will tell you of Shaso’s famous hatred of me.” He frowned. “But if it is not proved that he did it—then, no. I would not think him a murderer.”

  “What?” Briony’s voice was much louder than she would wish. Gailon of Summerfield looked at her disapprovingly. She felt a momentary urge to have the young duke clapped in leg irons or something—queens used to be able to do such things, so why not the princess regent? Despite his other faults, Dawet dan-Faar at least did not frown at her like an old servant just because she had raised her voice. “Do you jest?” she demanded. “You hate the man. It is clear in your every word and glance!”

  The emissary shook his head. “I do not love him, and just as he thinks I have done him harm, I think he has done me as much or more. But my disregard does not make him a murderer. I cannot believe he would treacherously kill someone, especially not someone of your family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All know that he owed your father a debt of honor. When my father fought against the last Autarch, Parnad the Unsleeping, Shaso did not return to help because he could not break his oath to your father. When his wife was ill, he also did not return, because he could not break that oath, nor did he return for her funeral. And so now I am asked whether I think he would kill Olin’s son? Drunkenly and treacherously? There may be stiffer spines and more stubborn hearts that have come out of Xand than Shaso dan-Heza’s—but I have not seen one.”

  What he said made her feel even more uncertain of things, and not just about Shaso’s guilt. Was this man Dawet a clever monster, or was he misunderstood? People often thought Barrick unpleasant, even cruel, because they did not see the whole of him.

  Barrick. A sudden twinge of alarm. He is lying ill in bed. I should go to him. In truth, the conversation had made her feel quite disturbed: she would not be unhappy to stop it. “I will consider your words, Lord Dawet. Now you may go.”

  He bowed once more. “Again, my condolences, Lady.”

  As he left, the councillors still watched her, but their faces were more shuttered than before. She suddenly realized that she had known most of them her entire life, these neighbors and family friends and even relatives, but did not trust a single one.

  “Make yourself vulnerable to no one but your family,” her father had once said. “Because that makes a small enough company that you can watch them all carefully.” She had thought at the time he was joking.

  But I have little family left, anyway, she thought. Mother and Kendrick are dead. Father is gone and may never come back. All I have is Barrick.

  The room seemed full of hateful strangers. Suddenly, all she wanted was to see her twin. She stood up and walked out of the throne room without another word, so quickly that the guards had to scramble to catch up to her.

  “It will not be easy,” Chert told Opal as he finished his soup. “We don’t have enough men to do a proper job, and the guild may not be able to get me more in time—the funeral is to be in five days. So for now we’re just throwing rubble down into the very pits where we were going to be working before the prince died. It’ll all have to be cleared out again afterward.”

  “Who could do such a terrible thing?” she said.

  For a moment, with his mind full of the task, he could not understand what she meant. “Ah. Do you mean killing the prince?”

  “Of course, you old fool. What else?” Her cross expression, mostly for effect, softened. “That family is under a curse. That’s what people were saying in Quarry Square today. The king captured, the younger prince a cripple, now this. And I suppose the children’s mother dying, too, though that was years ago . . .” She frowned. “But what about the new queen? If something happens to those poor twins, will her baby inherit the throne? Think of that . . . before it is even born.”

  “Fissure and fracture, woman, the twins are still alive—do you wish to bring something down on them? Never give the idle gods anything to think about.” The idea of something happening to the girl Briony, who had spoken to him just as freely and kindly as though he were a friend or family member, made him fearful in a way that a whole day in the royal tomb had not accomplished. “Where is Flint?”

  “In his bed. He was tired.”

  Chert got up and walked into the sleeping room where Flint’s straw pallet now lay at the foot of their own bed. The boy hurriedly shoved something under the rolled shirt which he used to cushion his head.

  “What’s that? What have you got, lad?” An ordinary child would probably have denied everything, Chert thought as he bent down, but Flint only watched with a certain hooded intent as he reached under the shirt and his hand closed around a confusing combination of shapes.

  Lifted out and held in the light of the lamp, he saw that they were two separate objects, a small black sack on a cord, which looked a bit familiar, and a lump of translucent, grayish-white stone.

  “What is this?” he asked, holding up the sack. Whatever it held so snugly was hard and almost as heavy as stone. The top of the bag was sewed shut, but the threadwork on the rest of it was intricate and beautiful. “Where did you find this, boy?”

  “He didn’t,” said Opal in the doorway. “He was wearing it when we found him. It’s his, Chert.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know. It isn’t ours to open, and he hasn’t wanted to.”

  “But this could have . . . I don’t know, perhaps something in it telling of his real parents. A piece of jewelry with his family name on it, perhaps.” Or a costly heirloom that might help pay for his room and board, Chert could not help thinking.

  “It is his,” said Opal again, quietly. She knelt beside the boy and stroked his pale hair and Chert suddenly understood that she didn’t necessarily want to find out the boy’s true name, his parent’s names. . . .

  “Well,” he began, looking at the sack, but now his attention was caught by the stone. What he had at first thought was only a sedimentary lump polished by rain or sea, or perhaps even just a weathered piece of pottery, was something much stranger. It was a stone, that seemed clear, but as he stared at it, he realized it was of a kind he had never seen before, nor could he even recognize where it fit in the Family of Stones and Metals. A Funderling not recognizing a stone’s family was something like a dairy farmer stumbling across not just a new breed of cow, but one that could fly.

  “Look at this,” he said to Opal. “Can you make anything of it?”

  “Cloudchip?” she suggested, naming an obscure kind of crystal. “Earth-ice?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s neither of those. Flint, where did you find this stone, boy?”

  “In the garden place. Outside where you were digging.” The boy stuck out his hand. “Give them back.”

  Chert glanced from the boy to the bag on a cord, the mysterious, sewn-shut bag. He handed it back to Flint but hung onto the murky crystal. He and Opal would need to talk about this mysterious legacy, but there was no sense worrying about everything at once. “I’m going to take this stone,” he told the child. “Not to keep, but because I’ve never seen anything like it and I want to see if someone can tell me what it is.” He looked at the boy, who stared back expectantly. It took Chert a moment to understand why. “If I may, that is,” he said. “You found it, after all.”

  The boy nodded, satisfied. As Chert and Opal went out, Flint rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling as he squeezed the little leather bag between his fingers.

  Opal ret
urned to her clearing up, but Chert only sat, turning the crystal over and over in his hand. It seemed to have an artificial shape, that was the strange thing, a regularity—it appeared to have been chipped out of some larger piece, but there were no fracture-markings; in fact, the edges were quite rounded. And it was definitely, incontrovertibly, something he had not seen before. A dark spot seemed to move in its depths.

  It troubled him, and the more he thought about it the more troubled he grew. It seemed like something that could only have come from behind the Shadowline, but if so, what was it doing deep inside Southmarch Castle? And was it coincidence that the boy found it in the cemetery, only a few hundred steps from the chambers where the prince regent was murdered? Or that the boy from beyond the Shadowline had been the one who found it?

  He looked at Opal, who was contentedly darning a hole in the knee of Flint’s breeches. He desperately wanted to ask her opinion, but knew he was going to spend a mostly sleepless night himself and was reluctant to rob her of what might be her last contented slumber for some time. Because a fear was growing inside him.

  What was it that Chaven had said? “Do not doubt that if the Shadowline sweeps across us, it will bring with it a dark, dark evil.”

  Let Opal at least have this night, he decided. Let her be happy this one night.

  “You’re quiet, Chert. Are you feeling poorly?”

  “All is well, my old darling,” he said. “Never fear.”

  10

  Halls of Fire

  INVOCATION :

  Here is the kingdom, here are its tears

  Two sticks

  Nothing is known about any day that is past

  —from The Bonefall Oracles

  IT WAS ALWAYS BAD IN the lands of sleep, but this was worse than the other nights, far worse. The long halls of Southmarch were again full of the shadow-men, the insubstantial but relentless figures who dripped and flowed like black blood, who oozed from the cracks between the stones and then took shape, faceless and whispering. But this night, everywhere they went, flames followed them, blazing up in the wake of their pursuit, until it seemed as though the very air would catch fire.

  Everywhere he went more of them appeared, oozing up from beneath the flagstones, clotting as they slid or shuffled after him, solidifying into vague man-shapes. Eyeless, still they stared, and they called mouthlessly after him, noises of both threat and promise. They followed him, many still joined to their brethren in a near-solid mass, and fire came behind them, catching in the tapestries and licking upward toward the ancient ceiling as the faceless men followed his hopeless attempt at flight from room to room, through corridor after corridor.

  They killed Kendrick! His heart seemed lopsided in his chest; his lungs burned. Room after room was wreathed in flame, but still the dark men swarmed after him.

  They want to kill me, too—kill us all! The air was so hot it scorched his nostrils and crackled in his throat, as though the entire palace had become an oven. These phantoms of soot, shadow, and blood had killed his brother and now they would kill him, too, chase him like a wounded deer and hound him to his death through endless halls of flame. . . .

  “Make him well!”

  Chaven stood slowly. At his feet, the page who crouched beside Barrick’s bed dabbed at the prince’s brow with a wet cloth. “It is not so easy, Princess . . .”

  “I don’t care! My brother is burning up with fever!” Briony felt a balance inside her tipping dangerously. “He is in pain!”

  Chaven shook his head. “With all respect, I think not so much, Highness. It is one of the boons of fever—it clouds much of the hurt of the illness and lets the mind float free of the body.”

  “Float free?” She struggled to control herself but her finger was trembling as she pointed at her writhing, moaning twin. “Look at him! Do you think he is free of anything?”

  The other physician, Brother Okros, cleared his throat. “Actually, my lady, we have seen others afflicted this way, but in a few days many have been well again.”

  She turned on this small, diffident man who had come from Eastmarch Academy in the mainland town to consult with Chaven. Okros took a step back as though she might hit him, and for a moment she felt a hysterical sense of pleasure at his fear, at the power of her own anger. “Yes? Many? What does that mean? And how long have you all known about this fever-plague?”

  “Since the ending of the last festival month, Highness.” There was a slight squeak in his voice. Okros was a priest, but mostly in name only, a teacher of the sciences who had probably seldom set foot in a Trigon temple since his ordainment. “Your brother—your other brother—was informed by the academy when the first groups of sufferers began to come to us. But he . . .”

  “Was killed? Yes.” She took a deep breath, but it did not calm her. “Yes, that might explain why he hasn’t given his time to this issue. Did you plan to wait until everyone else in my family was dead from one thing or another before mentioning this plague to me?”

  “Please, Princess,” said Chaven. “Briony. Please.”

  The use of her name caught her for a moment, made her look at the court physician. She couldn’t quite read the expression on his round face, but it was clear he was trying to tell her something. I am making a fool of myself, that is what. She looked around at the servants and guards in Barrick’s room and knew there were more castle folk outside, no doubt with their ears pressed to the door. She blinked against what felt like the beginning of tears. I am frightening everyone.

  “It is not a plague, Highness,” Okros said carefully. “Not yet. We have fever seasons like this almost every year. This is simply more severe than most.”

  “Just tell me what will happen to my brother.”

  “His elements are out of balance,” Chaven explained. “He is full of fire, at least in a sense. I do not want to insult you with what may seem like old superstitions, but it is hard to explain illness without also explaining how the elements within us correspond to the elements without—in our earth and in our firmament.” He rubbed his head wearily. “So I will only say that his blood is too heated because the elements are out of balance. Normally the elements of earth and water already inside him would serve to keep that balance, just as stones ring a blaze and water extinguishes it when necessary. But he is all fire and air at the moment, gusting and burning.”

  Gusting and burning. She looked down in horror at Barrick’s dear face, so contorted now and so oblivious. Oh, merciful Zoria, please don’t take him from me. Don’t leave me alone in this haunted place. Please.

  “Many have already survived this fever, Princess,” said little Brother Okros. “We have had news of it from southern travelers in prior days. It has already been in Syan and Jellon for months.”

  “Perhaps it came in with the ship from Hierosol,” Chaven suggested. He had tugged the page boy away and was examining Barrick again, smelling his breath. Briony’s twin was a little quieter, but he still murmured worriedly in his sleep, his face sparkling with sweat.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. It was the bleak and ruthless will of the gods, the dark wings she had felt spreading above them all. It was her every dire premonition coming true. “It doesn’t matter where it came from. Just tell me this—how many die from it and how many live?”

  “We hate to make pronouncements of that type, my lady . . .” began the academy physician.

  Chaven frowned at him. “At least half have survived. Unless they were babies or old folk.”

  “Half?” She was on the verge of shrieking again. She closed her eyes and felt the world spinning around her. All had gone mad. All had gone completely mad. “And what is the treatment?”

  “Open windows,” Okros said promptly. “Dirt from the temple of Kernios beneath the head and foot of his bed. And wrap him in wet cloths—water from Erivor’s temple basins would be particularly good, and we must make prayers to Erivor, of course, since he is your family’s special patron. All this will serve to soothe the influence
of fire and air.”

  “There are also herbs that might help.” As Chaven rubbed at his forehead again, considering, Briony noticed for the first time that the court physician looked dreadful. His features were pale and sagging, and he carried circles dark as bruises beneath his eyes. “Willow bark. And tea made from elder flowers might also help bring down the fever . . .”

  “We should bleed him as well,” added Okros, glad to be talking about something meaningful. “A bit less blood will ease his suffering.”

  Briony nudged Chaven to one side, none too gently, and with an immense rustling of skirts sank down beside her brother. These clothes keep me trussed like a troublesome horse, she thought as she struggled to find a comfortable position. Or a captured thief. It hurts even to bend.

  Her brother’s eyes were mere slits, but his pupils darted about between the lids.

  “Barrick? It’s me, Briony. Oh, please, can’t you hear me?” She touched his cheek then took his hand; despite its warmth, it was damp as something found in a rock pool. “I won’t leave you.”

  “You must leave him, my lady,” said a new voice. Briony looked up to see Avin Brone standing in the doorway, filling it with his bulk. “I beg your pardon, but the truth must be told. There is much to do. Tomorrow we bury the prince regent. Tomorrow someone must take up the scepter so that the people can see an Eddon still sits the throne. If Prince Barrick is too ill, then it must be you. And I have other news for you as well.”

  She felt a weird little thrill. So the only person I can absolutely trust not to send me to Ludis, she realized, will be on that throne. For a moment she had an image of all the things she might do, all the petty wrongs she could reverse. Then she looked down at Barrick again and the idea of what she might accomplish seemed pointless.

  “How many are sick with this?” she asked Chaven.

  “How many have the fever now?” He looked at the physician from the academy. “A few hundred in the town, perhaps. Is that right, Okros? And a dozen or so in the castle. Three of the kitchen servants, I think. Your stepmother’s maid and two of Barrick’s own pages.” He patted the head of the little boy who held the wet cloth. “Those are the ones I knew about when your brother began to sicken.”