by Tad Williams
Her tent was a thing woven of silence and thickened shadow. Several of her captains awaited her inside its surprisingly large expanse, seated around the dim amethyst glow of her empty helmet in a circle like the Whispering Mothers who nursed the Great Egg.
Yasammez wished she could send them all away—there was always that still moment before the noise and the blood and she preferred to spend it by herself—but first there were things she had to do and even a few hated formalities she must observe.
Morning-in-Eye of the Changing People was waiting, her naked chest heaving. She had just run a long way. “What do you bring me?” Yasammez asked her.
“They are no more than they seem, or else they have grown a thousand times more skilled in trickery than they once were. A small garrison lives inside the town gates. There are other small forces of armed folk in the larger houses, and an armory that suggests they can muster more when need be.”
“But the armory is full?”
Morning-in-Eye nodded her sleek head. “Pikes and helmets, bows, arrows—none have been given out. They do not suspect.”
Yasammez showed nothing, but she was pleased. An easy victory would bring its own problems, but it was more important that her army’s first blooding not be too perilous. Even with all those she had mustered, the People were still vastly outnumbered by the mortals who now filled the lands that once had belonged to her folk. She relied on surprise and terror to increase the size of her host tenfold.
“Hammerfoot of Firstdeep?”
“Yes, Lady.”
“It is long since we have come against mortal men or their works. When the village is afire, take some of your women and men and pull down the walls. See to the way of their building. It is only a town, but perhaps we will see something of what we must defeat when we come against the Old Place.”
“Yes, Lady.”
She turned to Gyir, the most trusted of her captains, and for a moment their thoughts commingled. Compared to her or even many of the others present he was merely a stripling, but his ferocity and cunning were second only to hers. She tasted his cold resolve and was pleased, then spoke so that the others might hear. “When we are putting the town to fire and the people to slaughter, it is my wish that a large number be allowed to escape, or at least to believe that they are escaping.” She paused for a moment, considered unflinchingly the horror that would come. “Let them be mostly females and their young.”
Stone of the Unwilling stirred, flickered. “But why, Lady? Why show them mercy? They never showed us any—when they found my people’s hive in the last great battles they burned it and clubbed our children to death as they came out, screaming and weeping.”
“It is not mercy. You should know that I of all the People have no such failing when it comes to the sunlanders. I wish the news of what happened here to spread—it will fill their land with terror. And the females and young we allow to escape will not take up arms as their males might, but in the cities we besiege they will need to be fed and watered, taking resources from those who do stand against us.” She slipped Whitefire from its sheath and laid it beside her helmet. There was no fire in her pavilion of shadow; the sword’s lunar glow gave all the light. “We have not spilled the blood of mortals since we retreated behind the Shadowline. Now that is ended. Let the Book of Regret remember this hour even beyond the world’s end.” She raised her hand. “Sing with me, for the sake of all the People. We must now praise the blind king and the sleeping queen and swear our fealty to the Pact of the Glass—yes, we will all swear to it together, think what we might—then we will take flame and fear to our enemies.”
PART THREE
FIRE
. . . And Perin went among them and heard their cries, and when they told him, not knowing who he was, of the terrible beast that beset them, he smiled and patted his great hammer and instructed them not to be afraid . . .
—from A Compendium of Things That are Known The Book of the Trigon
27
Candlerstown
THE TALE OF YEARS:
Each page turned is a page of fire
The tortoise licks his burned feet
And stares into darkness
—from The Bonefall Oracles
HE KNEW HE HAD TO PAY attention. Barrick knew that what was happening was terribly important, if hard to believe. He also knew that his sister was expecting him to shoulder some of the burden. He just didn’t know whether he could do it or not.
It was the dreams, his harrowing dreams, wearing him away just as the powerful ocean waves broke down the causeway between Southmarch’s castle and town, so that men had to labor constantly to build it back up again. Sometimes he found it difficult to remember what it felt like simply to be Barrick. There were nights when he woke scratching like a beast at the inside of his chamber door, locked each night by his servants to prevent him from walking in his sleep. Other midnights he came gasping up from nightmares, half certain that he had changed into something else entirely, and could only sit in the dark feeling at first his hands and arms and then, reluctantly, his face, terrified that he might find some dreadful transfiguration had taken place to match those dreams of violence. In many of the dreams he was surrounded by faceless shapes that wanted to imprison him, perhaps even kill him, unless he destroyed them first. Always he woke sweating, breathless with fear that he was becoming some brute beast like a shape-changer out of some old nurse’s tale, and worst of all, that this time the dream creature whose neck had just snapped in his hands would turn out to be a real person he had attacked—someone he knew, perhaps even someone he loved.
In fact, there seemed little separation now between the madness of nightmare and what had been the sanctuary of wakefulness. In the dim hours of the previous night he had awakened with a voice in his ear, someone speaking as though they sat right next to him, although the room was silent but for the breath of his slumbering page.
“We do not need the mantle any longer,” it had said—a woman’s voice, commanding, cold. It had not been like something heard in a dream, but had seemed to resound inside the very bones of his skull. He had whimpered at the sound, the nearness of it. “We will sweep down on them like fire. They will fear us in light as well as darkness . . .”
“. . . Prince Barrick?” said a gruff voice.
Someone was trying to get his attention—a real voice, not a midnight dream. He shook his head, trying to make sense.
“Prince Barrick, we know it is an effort for you to be here and we are all grateful for that. Shall I have someone bring you wine?” It was Avin Brone speaking, clumsily trying to let him know he was not paying attention.
“Are you ill again?” Briony asked quietly.
“I am well enough. It is . . . the fever, still. I do not sleep well.” He took a breath to clear his head, struggling to remember what the others had been saying. He wanted to show that he was worthy to sit beside his sister. “But why should these fairy-beasts come here and attack us? Why now?”
“We do not know anything for certain, Highness.” That was the quiet one, Vansen, the guard captain. Barrick wasn’t certain what he thought about the man. Briony’s anger with him had been reasonable—letting a reigning prince be killed in his own bedroom was obviously a dereliction of duty, and under old King Ustin the captain’s head would probably have been on a spike above the Basilisk Gate weeks ago—so he was not quite certain why she now seemed to be treating the young soldier like an important adviser. He dimly remembered Briony saying something about it as they made their way to this council, but his head had been pounding from the effort of getting up and getting dressed. “All I can say is that the creature we caught said something about someone leading an army, coming to burn our houses,” Vansen went on. “Strangely, it was a she the goblin said was going to do it. ‘She brings white fire,’ that’s what it told us. ‘Burn all your houses to black stones.’ But perhaps the monster did not speak our tongue well enough . . .”
Barrick felt a chill trac
e down his back. Vansen’s words were much like his dream, the cold, female voice out of the empty night. He almost said something, but the stony, doubting faces all around made him hold his tongue. The prince is imagining things, they would whisper to each other. His wits are going. He should never have confessed his secrets to Briony. Thank the gods he had not given up all caution and had kept the strangest of them to himself.
“Is there some reason this enemy couldn’t be a woman?” Briony demanded. Barrick could not help noticing changes in his sister: it was as though she had grown bigger, harder, while he grew smaller and more helpless daily. “Didn’t Anglin’s granddaughter Lily lead her people against the Gray Companies? If the Twilight People are somehow led by a woman, does that mean we have no need to be wary of them?”
“No, Highness, of course not.” Vansen flushed easily. Barrick wondered if the man was trying to hide a great anger.
“But the princess raises an important question,” said old Steffans Nynor with surprising matter-of-factness. The castellan seemed to have put aside his fluttery servility in this time of need. Eyes of Heaven, Barrick thought, have I been asleep for a hundred years? Is everyone turning into something else? For a moment the walls of the chapel seemed to drop away and he was turning, falling. He recovered himself by biting his tongue; as the pain jumped into the back of his mouth he heard Nynor say, “. . . after all. Perhaps they merely wish to test their strength—a raid or two, then back across the Shadowline.”
“Wishful thinking,” declared Tyne of Blueshore. “Unless Vansen is utterly mistaken, that is no raiding party. They are bringing a large army, the kind that will stay in the field until it has accomplished its task.”
“But why me?” said Earl Rorick. “First they steal my bride and her splendid dowry, now they will attack my lands. I have done nothing to offend these creatures!”
“Opportunity, my lord—that seems most likely,” said Vansen. He looked at Rorick with such a calm, measured gaze that Barrick could almost see him weighing the man and finding him to be a short measure. But Vansen is a dalesman, isn’t he? So Rorick is his lord. The idea that a liege lord would not receive the unquestioning respect of all his liegemen was a slightly new one to Barrick, who had spent his childhood so taken with his own cynicism that it had not occurred to him others might also find the ancient order of things to be less than perfect.
“Opportunity?” asked Briony.
“When I was in . . . when I was behind the Shadowline, Highness,” the captain said, “it was like falling into a fast river, even though I was less troubled than many of my men. But time and even . . . even the substance of things seemed different from place to place there, in the way . . . in the way that someone swept down a river might for a moment be pulled down and then be lifted to the surface again, or be caught for a moment in an eddy, then pushed helplessly into the rocks.”
“What are you talking about?” Avin Brone demanded. “You said ‘opportunity.’ ”
Vansen suddenly realized they were all looking at him. He colored again, lowered his head. “Forgive me, I am but a soldier . . .”
“Speak.” There was something in his sister’s voice that Barrick had never heard before; again he felt adrift, as though Vansen’s river had whirled him far away from his own, familiar life. “You are here precisely because you have seen things the rest of us haven’t, Captain Vansen. Speak.”
“I meant only that . . . that I wonder why, if they have gathered such an army, they should choose to enter the March Kingdoms at Daler’s Troth. I was born there, so I know it well. There are a few large towns, Dale House and Candlerstown and Hawkshill, but mostly it is hill crofts, a few larger farms, scattered villages. If they mean to come against us, and I believe they do, why should they start so far away? Even if they do not know that my men and I spied them and so they still believe they will surprise us, why should they take the chance that others will flee east with news of their coming and allow us to prepare? If they had come across the Shadowline in the Eastmarch hills, they would have been upon us already and I fear we would not be having this council, unless it was to meet our conquerors.”
“That is treason!” said Rorick. “Who is this lowborn soldier to tell us such things? Are you saying we cannot defeat them?”
“No, my lord.” Vansen’s jaw was set. He would not look at Rorick, but didn’t seem cowed. “No, but I saw them with these eyes—they have a great force. Had they come down on Southmarch in the night, this city would have been in terror and disarray.”
“What exactly are you trying to tell us, Captain Vansen?” Briony asked.
“That perhaps the Twilight Lands have their own ebb and flow.” He looked at her, almost imploring her to understand. “Perhaps they came through in the only place they could. It is hard to say what I mean—there are no words for it . . .”
“Perhaps the captain is right,” said Earl Gowan, whose fiefdom in Helmingsea included a small but excellent personal navy. Gowan usually had the air of someone who joined a discussion, no matter how serious, chiefly for amusement. “But perhaps they have no interest in Southmarch. Perhaps the hobgoblins are only a raiding party after all and you are mistaken, or perhaps their goal is farther south, in Syan. Wasn’t it King Karal of Syan who led the armies of Eion against them once upon a time? Perhaps they want revenge.”
Barrick could feel an easing of tension around the table. Some of the other nobles nodded their heads, agreeing. “No,” he said. He had been silent a long time: the others seemed surprised even to hear the prince speak. “They want this place—Southmarch. They lived here once.”
“That is an old tale,” Brone said slowly. “I am not certain it is true, Highness . . .”
But Barrick knew it was true, as certainly as if he had wakened on a cold, damp day and knew it was going to rain; he was not, however, able to explain why he was so sure. “Not just a tale,” was all he could muster. “They lived here once.”
Old Nynor cleared his throat. “It is true that . . . that there are stones beneath the castle and in the deep places that are part of some older stronghold.”
“Men have lived here a long while, even before Anglin’s folk,” said Tyne dismissively. “And the Funderlings were here when men arrived, everyone knows.”
“This is all beside the point,” said Briony. “Much as some of you might wish it, we cannot hope the Twilight People are going to Syan to revenge themselves on Karal’s heirs and leave it at that. They are in our lands. Every farm in Daler’s Troth is a part of the March Kingdoms. Just as Rorick is their lord and must protect those people and those lands, it is up to the crown of Southmarch to help him.”
Earl Rorick brushed a curl back from his forehead. He had made a concession to the fact of a war council—his outfit, though beautifully tailored, was considerably short of his usual extravagance, but he still looked no more ready for combat than would a peacock. “What . . . what do you plan, Highness?” He looked around at the other nobles, unhappily aware of how glad they all were that his lands, not theirs, would bear the brunt of what was coming.
“We will fight them, of course.” Briony suddenly seemed to remember her brother; she turned to Barrick with the tiniest flicker of the shamefaced smile that he alone knew well enough to recognize. “If you agree.”
“Of course.” A thought had come to him—a simple thing compared to all the dreadful visons that had been plaguing him, simple and satisfying. “We will fight.”
“Then we must finish our preparations,” she said. “Lord Brone, Lord Aldritch, you will proceed as we discussed earlier. We must put an army into the field now—if nothing else, to see how strong they are.”
Avin Brone and Tyne slowly nodded their heads, weighty men with weighty concerns.
“And I will lead it,” Barrick announced.
“What?” Briony recoiled as though he had slapped her. He was almost pleased to see her look so startled. A small, resentful part of him knew that she had grown accustomed to making
decisions without him. Now that would end. “But, Barrick, you have been ill . . . !”
Avin Brone thumped his big hands down on the table, then crossed his arms, hiding those hands in his jacket as though he feared they would get into mischief. “You cannot take such a risk, Highness,” he began, but Barrick did not let him finish.
“I am not a fool, Lord Brone. I do not imagine I am going to single-handedly drive off the Twilight People. I know you think I’m only a crippled child, and a headstrong one at that. But I will go and I will lead our army, at least in name. The Silver Wolf of Anglin must be on the field—anything else is unthinkable.” The glorious idea that had seemed so clear and so obvious a moment ago now seemed a bit muddled, but he pushed ahead. “Someone said earlier that Rorick must go, to show that the nobles of these lands will fight for what is theirs. Everyone knows that the people of Southmarch are frightened by the terrible things that have happened—our father a captive, Kendrick dead. If Vansen is right, even darker days are coming to us—a war against things we hardly understand. The people must see that the Eddons will fight for them. There are two regents, after all, which is an uncommon luxury. One of us must go into the field.”
His twin was so angry she could barely speak. It only made Barrick feel more coldly comfortable with his decision. “And what if you’re killed?”
“I told you, Sister, I’m not a fool. When King Lander put on his father’s crown at Coldgray Moor and fought the Twilight People, was he in the vanguard, trading blows? But he was remembered for a great victory and his people treasure his name.” He realized too late he had said something foolish—they would misunderstand.