by Tad Williams
When his thoughts at last came back to him, when the dreams finally began to shred and disperse like wind-tormented clouds, Chert couldn’t make sense of what he saw; in fact, he wondered if he hadn’t merely passed into some different and only slightly less hectic realm of madness. He was standing at the foot of a mountain, a great jut of dark stone, a massive shadow in the thin, dim light that seemed to come from all directions and none—but how could there be such a thing, a mountain inside a mountain? Nevertheless, there it was, a monstrous black lump rising a hundred times his own height or more; he stood at its foot like an ant gazing up at a man.
Oh, Elders save me, it’s the gate, the black gate. I have climbed all the way down to Kernios . . . and Immon—Noszh-la himself—is going to find me wanting and chew me in those terrible, stony teeth . . . !
Something flickered like lightning inside the vast black shape that loomed above him. A moment later a mad radiance began to leak out from every part of it, but strongest in the center, where it formed the rough shape of a man. A shining man.
Chert stared in horrified fascination, but also with a growing sense of relief. He was standing right at its feet. He had crossed under the Sea in the Depths.
Still, he had never imagined what it would be like to stand before it. The rock seemed half translucent, half solid black basalt, and the light that streamed out bent as it came and broke into more colors than surely could be contained in a rainbow—so many colors and all moving so strangely! He had to narrow his eyes until they were almost shut and still it made him dizzy, made his head waver and his stomach lurch. He collapsed to his knees on the stony shore of the island. The heart of the blazing, coruscating brilliance did indeed have the shape of a person, although the stone—semi-translucent as volcanic glass, and the very inconstancy of the lights made it hard to discern. Still, it almost seemed to move, to writhe within the rock as though racked with nightmares, or as though it sought escape.
At last Chert could not look at it even through squinting eyes and so he lowered his face. He crouched on all fours like a dog, feeling as though he would be sick, and it was then, as the glare faded, that he saw the boy lying stretched out on the gravel slope a few yards above him.
“Flint!” His voice flew out—he could almost see the echoes spreading and chasing each other, growing smaller like ripples. He scrambled up the loose stones. The boy was curled on his side but almost facedown, one arm reaching upslope as though offering a gift to the gleaming giant. Chert saw something flat and shiny in the boy’s hand as he turned him over, noted distractedly that it was the mirror that he and Opal had discovered in the boy’s cherished bag, the child’s one possession, but then the sight of Flint’s face, pale as bone beneath the dark dust, eyes half open but sightless, drove all other thoughts from his mind.
He would not wake, no matter how Chert shook him. At last the Funderling dragged the boy up and pulled him to his chest, then pressed the cold cheek tight against his neck and shouted for help as though there were people around to hear him—as though Chert Blue Quartz were not the last living creature in the whole of the cosmos.
The sky had lightened a shade, but still no birds were singing. Barrick’s heart hurried, fast as a dragonfly’s wings, until he found it hard to get his breath. The quiet sounds of the camp rising were all around him. He wondered if any of the others had managed to sleep.
He tested the saddle straps once more, loosened and then retightened one even though it did not need tightening. His black horse, Kettle—named to irritate Kendrick as much as anything else, who had believed in noble names for noble steeds—whickered in irritation.
Barrick watched Ferras Vansen, the guard captain, going from one smoldering fire to another, talking to the men, and found himself irritated by the man’s calm attention to duty. Slept like an innocent child, no doubt. He didn’t really know what to think about Vansen, but didn’t much want to trust him. No one could truly be quite that honest and forthright—years in the Southmarch court had taught Barrick that. The guard captain was playing some deeper game—perhaps the innocent one of craving advancement, perhaps something more subtle. Why else would he be watching Barrick so closely? Because he was, there was no doubt of that; Vansen’s eyes were on him every time Barrick turned around. Whatever the case, the man bore watching. Briony might have forgiven him his derelictions, but his sister’s angers were always quicker to cool. Barrick Eddon was not so easily mollified.
A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped, which made Kettle prance in place, snorting nervously.
“Sorry, lad,” said Tyne Aldritch. “I mean, your pardon, Highness. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t . . . I mean . . .”
The Earl of Blueshore stepped back. His breath smelled of wine, although he showed no signs of having drunk more than he should. Barrick remembered the stream winding down through the thorny black vines and couldn’t really blame the man for not wanting to drink from it. “Of course,” Tyne said. “It’s only that I was remembering the night before my first battle. Did you sleep?”
“Yes,” Barrick lied. What he really needed to do now, he realized, was piss. Tyne had almost frightened the water out of him.
“I was reminded of when I went as my uncle’s squire to Olway Coomb. Dimakos Heavyhand was one of the last chieftains of the Gray Companies, and he and his men had come into Marrinswalk, burning and looting. Your father was down in Hierosol with most of the hardened Southmarch fighters, but those remaining made common cause with the Marrinswalk men and such others as we could gather, then met the raiders in the valley. Dimakos had come there first and had the high ground, although we were the larger force.” Tyne smiled a hard smile. “My uncle Laylin saw that I was fearful about the battle to come and brought me to the questioning of a prisoner, a scout from Heavyhand’s company we had captured. The man would say nothing of use no matter the persuasion, I will give him that, and when it became certain we would get nothing more from him, my uncle slit the man’s throat and rubbed the hot blood on my face. ‘There,’ he told me. ‘Well-blooded is well-begun.’ Nor would he let me wash it off until we rode. It itched so that that I scarcely thought of anything else until I struck my first blow in anger.” Tyne laughed quietly. “Harsh, but my uncle was one of the old men, the hard men, and that was their way. Be glad we do not live in such times . . . although perhaps we will miss his like before long, if the gods are unkind.” He made the sign of the Three, then clapped Barrick on the back so that the prince almost lost control of his bladder once more. “Fear not, lad. You will do your father proud. We will send these Twilight folk back to their boggart hills with something to think about.”
Was that supposed to make me feel better? Barrick wondered as Tyne walked away, but he couldn’t worry about it long, as he was already fumbling with the laces of his small-clothes.
Expecting little in the way of siege play, they had brought only a small contingent of Funderling miners, but these were also serving as gunnery men. Barrick tried to sit still in the saddle as the tiny shapes in leather hoods and cloaks, their eyes insectlike behind thick spectacles of smoked crystal, aimed the bombards up the hillside. Although he was armored, Barrick was not going in the first waves of mounted men, not least because he could only carry a light sword instead of a lance; he should have been angry at the coddling but found he was grateful. Dawn was just touching the edge of the eastern sky. The clumps of shadow were becoming bushes and trees again, and although the forest at the top of the hill was still shrouded in mist, beneath the lightening sky it did not look quite so fearsome and mysterious. In fact, everything was equally strange to Barrick’s eye just now, befogged forest and mortal army; even though he was in the midst of it, he felt as though he looked down on the scene from some high window, perhaps from Wolfstooth Spire.
Still, he held his breath as fire was touched to the train and the guns began to speak, barking like bronze dogs and spewing stone balls toward the trees on the hilltop. The fir
st shots fell short, bouncing up the slope and vanishing into the leafy cover, but the Funderlings raised the bombards and let fly again; this time the round stones crashed into the center of the hillcrest, tearing away branches and knocking down trees. When the roaring stopped, there was only silence for a moment as Barrick and the others peered through the drifting smoke. A wailing cry went up from the hilltop, and at first he felt a fierce, relieved joy—they had killed most of them, they must have! Then he heard the note of defiant triumph in the inhuman voices. It sounded like there were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands.
Tyne had waited impatiently for the barrage to finish. He had already made it clear that he believed cannons were for siegework, nothing else, but he had bent to the wishes of Ivar Brenhill and the other more progressive war barons. Now he lowered the visor on his helmet and waved his arm. The first row of archers let fly, then crouched as the second row filled the air with their own arrows. Tyne waved again and with a shout that was almost as daunting as the cry from the hilltop, the first wave of pikemen dashed up the slope, pike shafts waving and clacking like a denuded version of the forest above, the wielders sped by the knowledge that the mounted men behind them would ride down any stragglers. A flight of arrows whistled toward them from the heights, strangely few but terribly accurate. A dozen men were down already, at least one of them a knight: his horse was dying beside him, legs thrashing as the other mounted men surged past.
Long, confused moments of noise and smoke passed before Barrick and the men around him spurred their own horses up the hill, time enough for the first wave of foot soldiers to reach the top and plunge into the trees. He heard shouts, excited cries, even a few screams, but over everything he heard the unnatural voices of the enemy—keening noises like seabirds, like the howls of wolves and the barks of foxes, but with words buried in them to make the strange sounds even more terrible.
“Briony . . .” he murmured, but even he could not hear the name.
Some of the first wave of soldiers came reeling back, bloodied and shrieking. The fairies had built a wall of thorns. The mounted men behind them pushed on, some wielding axes, hacking their way in and killing many of the wall’s defenders. Arrows were snapping out of the trees at them, but still strangely few, and Barrick could almost feel the mounting concern of Tyne and the other war leaders—was it an ambush, after all? But the hillsides and meadows all around were still empty: for this moment, the forested crest seemed the angry heart of the world, an island of noise and struggle surrounded by stillness.
“They break out!” someone called in a throttled, high-pitched voice—Barrick thought it might be his cousin Rorick. On the hilltop a knot of men had been forced backward out of the trees, fighting hand-to-hand with a group of howling, white-haired warriors. At the center of the defenders a hugely tall figure stood in his stirrups, slashing with what even from a great distance seemed a bizarre, misshapen blade. The defender was tall, with snowy hair flowing free in the wind like a woman’s, and Barrick thought for a moment he must be an old man, but a glimpse of his face showed youthful features, and skin stretched tight over bones sharp enough to cut leather. The Twilight man struck down one of Tyne’s soldiers, then another, spinning the blade in the second man’s guts like a peasant churning butter. One of the mounted nobles spurred toward him, lance lowered, and the white-haired fairy or elf or whatever kind of creature he was knocked the weapon aside before closing with his attacker. Barrick lost sight of them behind a clump of trees as he neared the crest, then the forest was all around him and the men with whom he rode, mist puffing up from their horses’ hooves.
“Forward!” someone else shouted. “But stay together!” Barrick was surprised to realize it was Vansen, that the man had found his way to them through the trees and the mayhem, but he did not have long to contemplate it. A figure suddenly sprang up from the undergrowth—no, two figures, three!—and Barrick had to strike away a hand clawing at his bridle. The sound of many voices echoed through the trees, as many unnatural as natural, and in the cloudy, slanting light a thousand weird shapes loomed between the trunks—shadows and tricks of the light, perhaps, but there were enough real bodies and enough pale, hating faces that he had no time to consider anything except staying alive.
Half a dozen men of Barrick’s party were left of the original dozen, although some of the others had merely become lost among the trees. Vansen was one of those remaining and he leaned close to Barrick and asked quietly, “Are you well, Highness?”
Barrick could only nod. He was gasping for breath and there were cuts and scratches on his hands and no doubt elsewhere, but he thought he had killed at least one of the fairy folk—a face that came toward him down a shadowy tree branch, and which he had split with a startled swing of his blade—and he did not seem to have any major wounds. The forest was mostly empty here, although the fearful sounds of the Twilight folk were still loud, and unnatural shapes still flitted between the distant trees.
“I think I hear Tyne this way,” Vansen said, then spurred across the clearing. Barrick and the others followed him, all struggling for breath, their necks prickling, not certain when the next attack would come. Barrick felt as though he was peering down one of Chaven’s optical tubes, that everything around him had been bent except for that at which he stared. All his blood seemed to be rushing through his head while his body was coldly numb, hard and unfeeling as iron. It was a strange, terrifying, exhilarating feeling.
Ferras Vansen suddenly reined up beside a patch of deep brush and struck downward with his sword, then swung out of the saddle and began hacking away at something unseen. He was shouting, and although the guard captain’s words couldn’t be heard over the shrilling of fairy voices, there was a wild look of disgust and fear on his face that cut through Barrick’s numbness, clutched at the pit of his stomach. He spurred forward with the others just as a great number of the keening fairies all went silent at the same moment. Unearthly voices still sounded, but only from the other side of the hilltop.
Vansen stood upright, his killing finished, his blade dripping with blood and something else translucent as tree sap. His face was a mask of horror. Barrick dismounted awkwardly and made his way to the captain’s side.
He was standing in the midst of what might almost have been a huge nest hidden in the undergrowth, trampled and exposed now, with bodies and body parts piled at his feet, glistening with blood and other fluids. The things lying there, Barrick could see after a moment of confusion at the unusual forms, were naked and mostly manlike, pale as maggots. Those whose heads he could see had huge swollen throat pouches, like frogs. Their dead eyes were solid black, rapidly losing luster.
“What are they?” someone asked.
“Horrible,” someone else said, and it was true.
“The things that made the noises,” Vansen told them. “Listen.” And for a moment they all heeded the silence.
“What . . . what does it mean?” Barrick asked. “Why?”
“Because we have been tricked,” said Vansen. Beneath the spatters of blood, his face was almost as pale as the grotesque shapes at his feet. “Only a few waited for us on this hilltop—a few soldiers to cross blades with us, a few deceiving shapes, a few of these making the noise of hundreds.”
“Gods! An ambush, after all?” Barrick looked around, expecting to see dozens more of the strange faces appear in the branches over their heads, grinning savagely.
“Worse,” said Vansen. “Worse. Because they have held us here and stolen a day from us with a very few while the rest of their army rode on around us.”
“Rode on . . . ?”
“Yes. Toward Southmarch.”
34
In a Marrinswalk Field
SWEETNESS OF FLOWERS:
She cannot stop or cry out
She cannot grow
Her bones are in the stream
—from The Bonefall Oracles
IT HAD BEEN A BAD NIGHT, a night of little sleep. Briony had been up since an hour b
efore dawn with such anger running through her that she could scarcely sit still—anger at Hendon Tolly, of course, but also at herself for her foolish loss of control, at Barrick for not being with her, at everything.
And I stood there, waving a sword at him in front of everyone, and they all knew he could not lift a finger against me—his ruler, and a woman at that. A . . . girl. And they all knew he didn’t need to, either, because he’d already won. What a fool I must have looked!
For a long moment it was all she could do to stay seated at the writing desk—she was itching with embarrassment despite being the only person awake in the room. She wanted to run, to lose herself somewhere in the great castle until everyone forgot what happened. But of course, nobody would forget and she couldn’t run away. She was an Eddon. She was the princess regent. They would be talking about last night’s dinner for years.
There was nothing to do but go on. Nothing. Briony picked up her pen, dipped it into the inkwell, and continued her letter to her father.
“I have not heard from you since Kendrick’s death, and as I said, I can only pray that you received my letter telling you of that terrible day, that this which I write now is not the first you have heard of it. I miss him, dear Father, I miss my big brother very much. Because he was the oldest, he was always certain he was right, and of course that was vexing at times, but I honestly think he tried every day to do right. He wanted to be you, of course, that is why. Even before he became the regent, he held himself like a man who will rule one day, who concerns himself with the needs of the least of his subjects as well as the demands of his most powerful allies.