Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  “Enough of this unhappy subject. I trust that I will still come back to you hale and well—Ludis wants bright gold in his hands, or at worst a living bride, but not a dead king. In the hours and days until then, please see that the castle is made safe. There are still too many places where we are vulnerable, and the slack methods of peacetime quickly become lasting regrets. Tell Brone also that the tunnels beneath the castle have not been surveyed in a hundred years, while the Funderlings have been burrowing like moles, and that there are so many holes in so many Southmarch basements that...”

  “And there it ends,” said Utta. “Except that there is a curious addendum written in the side margin, in quite a different fist.”

  “I could not make that out—read it to me,” demanded Merolanna.

  The Zorian sister squinted for a moment, trying to make sense of it. It was in an archaic-looking script, much smaller and more clumsily done than the king’s writing, twisted so that it would fit into the letter’s narrow margins, but the ink seemed quite fresh and new.

  “If ye desire to knowe more, we wold speake with you. Say only, YES, and we will heare ye, howsowever.”

  Utta looked up at the duchess, perplexed. “I have no idea what that means.”

  “Nor do I. Any of it. But if someone is listening, I will say it. Yes!” She almost shouted the word. “There. How is that for madness? I am talking to ghosts. It will not be the first time this cursed year.”

  Utta ignored that, looking around the room, trying to spot anyplace that someone might hide and spy on them. The chamber had no windows, and since the duchess’ part of the residence was on the topmost floor, nothing lay above them but the roof. Could someone be up there, crouching beside the bedchamber’s small chimney, listening? But surely they would hear anyone moving about up there, or the guards would spot them.

  The two women sat together in silence for long moments, waiting to see if anything would come of the strange request and Merolanna’s accession, but at last the duchess raised herself shakily from the bed. “Whatever happens, I cannot in good faith keep you here all day, although it is a comfort to see you, Sister Utta. I do not trust many of those around me, and none of those who have sided with the Tollys, those damnable traitors.”

  “Please, my lady, not so loudly, even in your own chambers.”

  “Do you think they would have me tried and executed?” Merolanna laughed with something that sounded almost like pleasure. “Ah, but I’d scorch them first, wouldn’t I? I’d speak my mind and burn the skin from their ears! Hiding behind a baby like that, claiming to protect Olin’s throne when everyone knows they’ve been itching to get their hands on it since his poor brother died.” She waved her hand in disgust. “Enough. I will walk you to the door. It is time I get out of this room, before I start seeing the phantoms I’m speaking to.”

  Merolanna bid her good-bye, offering her Eilis to walk back with her, but Utta politely refused. She wanted to walk by herself and think about what had happened.

  Before she got two dozen steps down the hall, the door opened up again and Merolanna called after her in a cracked, frightened voice.

  “Utta! Utta, come here!”

  When she returned to the rooms, she let Merolanna lead her with trembling hand into the bedchamber. There, in the middle of the bed, lay another piece of paper—a torn scrap of parchment this time, but the writing was in the same crabbed, ancient style.

  “Come to us to-morrow an howre after suns set, in the top of the Tower of Summer.”

  14. Hunted

  Then Zmeos and his siblings reappeared, and disputed the right of Perin Skylord and his brothers to rule over heaven, but the three brothers met their scorn with peace. For a long time they all lived in uneasy alliance until the eye of Khors fell on Zoria, Perin’s virgin daughter. Khors coveted her, and so he stole her from her father’s house, taking her to his fortress.

  —from The Beginnings of Things, The Book of the Trigon

  Something was tugging at his hair.

  Ferras Vansen had been lost in dreams of sunny meadows, but even in that fair place something dark had been lurking in the grass, and now it took him a few heartbeats to shake off the grip of the fearful dream.

  “Master!” Skurn again took a clump of Vansen’s hair in his beak and yanked. The bird’s foul breath was right in his face. “Wake up! Something out there!”

  Awake, dreaming, it made no difference—fear and misery were everywhere. Vansen rolled over. The bird hopped off him, flapping awkwardly back to the ground. “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

  “Us can’t say,” it whispered. “Smells like leather and metal. And noises there be, quiet ones.”

  A tall, menacing shadow fell over Vansen, blocking the faint glow of the guttering fire. Suddenly very much awake, he snatched at his blade, tangling it and himself in the cloak he used as a blanket, but the shadow did not move.

  It was Gyir, his hand held out in a gesture of demand, the eyes in his featureless face staring at Ferras Vansen with an intensity that seemed to glow.

  Give. Vansen could almost hear the word, although the faceless creature had not spoken aloud. Give.

  “He wants his sword,” Prince Barrick whispered, sitting up.

  “Give it to him...” “Give him...?”

  “His sword! He knows this place. We do not.”

  Vansen did not move for a moment, his eyes swiveling between the prince and the looming, red-eyed fairy. At last he rolled over and pulled the scabbarded blade out from under his cloak. The fairy-man closed his fingers around the hilt and pulled it free, leaving Vansen holding the empty sheath as Gyir turned and vanished into the undergrowth around their small hillside encampment, swift and silent as a breeze.

  “This is mad...” Vansen muttered. “He’ll sneak back and kill us both.”

  “He will not.” Barrick took off his boots and wiped his feet with the edge of his tattered, filthy cloak before pulling the boots back on. “He is angry, but not at us.”

  “What do you mean, angry?”

  Skurn fluffed his feathers in worry. Small fragments of sticky eggshell flecked his beak and breast. Whatever had startled the raven seemed to have caught him midmeal. “Them all are mad, the High Ones,” the bird said quietly. “Have lived too long in the BlackTowers, them, staring into they mirrors and listening to voices of the dead.”

  “What does that mean? Have all of you lost your minds?”

  “Gyir is angry because the raven heard the noises before he did,” Barrick said calmly. “He blames himself.”

  “But why should...?” Vansen never finished his question. From farther up the hillside echoed a noise unlike anything he had ever heard, a honking screech like a blast from a trumpet that had been bent into some impossible shape. “Perin’s hammer,” he gasped, “what is that?”

  “Oh, Masters, them are Longskulls or worse!” squawked the raven.

  “Whatever the bird scented, Gyir found.” Barrick was still donning his boots, as calmly as if preparing for a walk across the Inner Keep back home.

  Vansen struggled to his feet. “Shouldn’t we...help him?” The thought was disturbing, but he had little doubt there were worse things afoot in these lands than Gyir. He had seen one of them take his comrade Collum Dyer, after all.

  “Wait.” Barrick held up his hand, listening. The youth still had that unthinking air of command—the inseparable heritage of a royal childhood—despite looking as disreputable as the poorest cotsman’s urchin, even by the feeble glow of the fire. His hair, wet and festooned with bits of leaves, stuck out as eccentrically as Skurn’s patchy feathers, and his clothes could only have looked more ragged and filthy if they had not originally been black. “It’s Gyir. He wants us to come to him.”

  “Why? Is he...has he...”

  “He is unharmed—but he is still angry.” Barrick smiled a tight, secretive smile.

  “Your Higness, what if he tricks us? I know you do not fear him, but think! He has his weapon back.
Now would be the perfect time for him to murder us—it is dark, and he knows this forest much better than we do.”

  “If he wanted to kill us he could have done it any of the last few nights. He is not just angry—he is frightened, too. He needs us, although I am not quite sure why.” Barrick frowned. “I cannot hear him anymore. We must go to him.”

  Without even a torch to light his way, Barrick started up the hillside in the direction of the scream. Vansen cursed and bent for a stick from the fire, then hurried after him.

  The returning rains had washed the pall of smoke from the sky, but not the ever present Mantle, as Gyir called it: even in the middle-night a dull glow still bled through the closeknit branches above them, as though the murky skies had held onto a touch of the daylong twilight, soaking it up like oil so that it would sputter dimly through the night. But it was difficult to see even with the nightglow and the pathetic, makeshift torch: by the time he caught up to the prince, Vansen had scraped himself raw on several branches and had fallen down twice. Barrick turned to help him up the second time.

  “Faster,” said the prince.

  But I was having such a good time dawdling and enjoying the sights, your Highness, Vansen thought sourly.

  Skurn caught up with them in a moment—the raven could make faster time upslope than they could, hopping, sometimes flying awkwardly for a few yards at a time. The old bird seemed always to move in an odor of wet earth and a faint putridity: Vansen scented him a moment before he heard him flapping along behind them.

  “Head down, Master,” Skurn hissed. Vansen narrowly avoided running face-first into a low branch. Thereafter he found the bird’s smell easier to bear.

  Vansen gasped when Gyir abruptly stepped out of a copse of trees directly in front of them. The fairy-man’s sword was dripping black, his jerkin and gloved hands also spattered.

  Gyir gestured toward the copse behind him. Vansen went to look, still unable to shake off a fear that the faceless creature might turn on them at any moment. Because he was looking back over his shoulder, trying to locate Gyir in the nighttime dark, he almost stepped on the first body. Hand trembling, he held the brand down close, trying to understand what he was seeing.

  The body seemed all wrong, somehow—folded into angles normal bones did not allow. It had a long, bony head which stuck out before and behind, and hard, leathery skin which only made the inhuman shape more obvious. The dead creature’s arms were long and might have had an extra joint in them—it was hard to tell because of the darkness, but also because Gyir had made such a bloody mess of the thing. Still, it was the head that was most disturbing, especially the long, bony, beaklike snout, and although the dead creature’s forehead was nearly human, the deep-set eyes might have belonged to a lizard.

  The clothes that it wore were disturbing, too. The fact that this monster wore anything at all, much less a full battle-rig, an oily leather jerkin under chain mail, was enough to make Vansen’s stomach squirm and a sour taste rise into the back of his mouth.

  A second beak-faced corpse lay a few feet away, the bony head cut almost in half, the clawed, bloody hands still spread as if to ward off the deathblow.

  “Perin’s hammer, what are these...things?” Vansen asked. “Were they after us?”

  “Don’t know, but Gyir says they’re Longskulls,” Barrick said. “That’s one of the reasons he’s so angry. He’s still suffering from the wounds the Followers gave him, he says, or he would have had all three of them.”

  “Longskulls,” wheezed Skurn. “And not ordinary roving Longskulls either, this lot. They belong to someone, they do —can tell it by their wearings.”

  Gyir bent and turned the creature’s ugly head with his sword blade so that they could see a mark scorched onto its bony face—a brand, several overlapping, wedge-shaped marks like a scatter of thorns.

  “Jikuyin,” Barrick said slowly. “I think that is how Gyir would say it.”

  The raven gave a croak of dismay. “Jack Chain? Them do belong to Jack Chain?” He fluttered awkwardly up onto Vansen’s shoulder, almost overbalancing him. “We must run far and fast, Master. Far and fast!”

  “The one you talked about?” Vansen looked from the silent Gyir to Barrick. “I thought we had left his territory behind!”

  The prince did not answer for a moment. “Gyir says we will have to take turns sleeping and watching from now on,” he said at last. “And that we must keep our weapons close.”

  The road was still overgrown, half-invisible most of the time beneath drifts of strange plants or the damage from roots and floods, but the trees were beginning to thin: ragged segments of gray sky appeared on the horizon, stretched between the trunks of trees like the world’s oldest, filthiest linens hung out to dry. Even the rain was lightening to a floating drizzle, but Barrick did not feel a corresponding relief.

  What are we running from? he asked Gyir. Not those bony things?

  Take care. The fairy reached out a pale hand, pointing at a spot just ahead where the way forward dissolved into tumbled stones and shrubbery. Barrick reined up and the weirdling horse named Dragonfly walked around the ruined section before resuming its trot. Gyir leaned forward over the horse’s long neck again, looking like the figurehead of a most peculiar ship.

  What are we running from? Barrick asked again.

  Death. Or worse. One of the Longskulls escaped. A wash of disgust moved underneath the fairy’s thought, as obvious as a strong odor.

  But you killed two by yourself. Vansen is a soldier, and I can fight, too. Surely we don’t have anything to fear from the one that got away?

  They do not hunt alone, or even in packs of three, sunlander. Gyir seemed to bite back a rage that, if freed, could not be captured again. They are cowardly. They like company.

  Hunt?

  In Jikuyin’s service they are slavers or harvesters. Either way, those three were out hunting. They were scouts for a larger troop—I know it as I know that the White Root is in the sky overhead. This last came to Barrick as no more than the idea of a bright light shining through fog. The more disturbed Gyir became, the less work he put into choosing concepts Barrick could easily understand. Would you rather be enslaved or eaten? It is not a good choice, is it?

  And who is Jikuyin? You keep talking about him, but I still don’t know!

  The one the bird calls Jack Chain. He is a power, an old power, and now that Qul-na-Qar has lost so much of its...—again an idea Barrick could not understand, something that came to him as “glow” but also “language” and perhaps even “music,” an impossible amalgamation.

  Clearly Jikuyin is confident of his strength, if he dares to spread his song so far into free territory.

  Barrick understood almost none of this. His arm was hurting him fiercely—the wet weather in these lands had done him no good at all—and the rib he had injured in a fall still pained him too. But it was rare to get Gyir to speak at any length. He was reluctant to give up the chance.

  What kind of power is he? Is he another king, like the blind one you the talk about?

  No. He is an old power. He is one of the gods’ bastards, as I told you. We defeated most of them back in the Years of Blood, but some were too clever or too strong and hid away in deep places or high places. Jikuyin is one of those.

  Some kind of god? And he’s hunting...for us? Barrick suddenly felt as if he might fall out of his saddle—a swooning, light-headedness that for several heartbeats turned the forest around him into a meaningless rush of green. When the rushing ended, Gyir’s arm was gripping his belt, holding him upright.

  “I’m well, I’m well...” Barrick said out loud, then realized Vansen and the raven were staring at him. They were riding almost beside him when he had been certain they were a dozen or more lengths behind, as though he had lost a few moments of time during his spell of dizziness.

  Shouldn’t we turn back, if this...creature, this Jack Chain, is searching for us?

  Not searching for us, I think. He would not send mer
e Longskulls to capture one like me. There was arrogance and pride in the thought, but also regret. He could not know I have been...damaged.

  Damaged?

  Now the regret felt more like shame. Barrick did not need to see Gyir’s face (which obviously never revealed much anyway) to understand the fairy’s grim mood. The Followers, when they attacked me—I fell. They struck my head several times and then I hit it again on a stone. I am...blind.

  The word didn’t seem right, somehow, but Barrick still reacted with astonishment. What do you mean, blind? You can see!

  Only with my eyes.

  While Barrick puzzled over this, Ferras Vansen rode up beside them again—as close as Vansen’s mortal horse would come, anyway: even after a tennight traveling together, the animal always stayed at the stretched end of his tether when the company made camp, keeping as distant from the fairy-horse as he could. “Your Highness, are you ill?” the soldier asked. “You almost fell out of your saddle...”

  “There is nothing wrong with me. Let me be.” He wanted to talk to Gyir again, not swap braying mortal speech with this...peasant.

  A peasant who came with you when he didn’t have to, an inner voice reminded him, and for once he was hearing himself, not Gyir. A peasant who came to this wretched place with full knowledge of what it was like.

  Barrick took a breath. “I do not mean to be...I am well enough, Captain Vansen.” He could not bring himself to apologize. “You and I will talk later.”

  The soldier nodded and reined up a little, letting Barrick’s horse take the lead again. As they fell back, the scruffy black bird crouching on Vansen’s saddle watched the prince with disconcertingly shrewd eyes, like Chaven the physician seeing through one of Barrick’s tantrums to the real matter beneath. For a moment the prince was painfully lonely again for Southmarch, for familiar faces and familiar things.

  You said blind. Why? he asked. Your eyes work, don’t they?

  Gyir would not speak for long moments. I am the Storm Lantern, he said finally. It is given to me to see in darkness, to see what is behind the light, to see things that are far away. I have an eye inside me, inside my head. Never before would three Longskulls have crept so close to me. Never before would I have to learn of it from a mere raven! But now I am blind.