Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  If the room full of plaster models at the bottom of the tower had seemed cluttered, this was something else again. Books had been stacked everywhere across the floor in unsteady-looking towers, and across every surface, many of them open, covering the two long tables in heedless piles. More than a few of the volumes lay bent-backed, perched like clumsy nesting birds on tabletop or pile, in positions that likely had not changed since the king’s disappearance. Many had lost pages: a mulch of creased parchments covered the floor like drifts of leaves. For Zoria, tutored in the thrifty ways of the Zorian sisterhood, where books were a precious, expensive resource and could be read only with the permission of the adelfa, the mistress of the shrine’s sisterhood, this careless plenitude was both exhilarating and shocking.

  “What a dreadful clutter!” said Merolanna. “And it’s frightfully cold in here, too. I’m shivering, Utta. Would you see if there’s any wood, and light a fire?”

  “Light not any fires, great ladies!” a tiny voice piped. “I beg ’ee, or tha will scorch my own sweet mistress most cracklingly!”

  Utta jumped and dropped the torch, which with great good fortune landed in one of the few places on the floor not covered with sheets of book paper. She snatched it up again, breathing thanks she had not set the entire tower aflame. “What was...?”

  Merolanna had given a little screech at the mysterious words, and now reached out and clutched Utta’s shoulder so fiercely that the Zorian sister could barely restrain a cry of her own. “It was here! In this very room!” the duchess whispered. She made the sign of the Three. “Who speaks?” she demanded aloud, her voice cracked and quavering. “Are you a ghost? A demon spirit?”

  “No, great ladies, no ghost. I will show myself presently.” The faint, shrill voice might almost have come from the phantom of the dead mouse downstairs. A moment later, Utta saw something stirring on the tabletop. A minuscule, four-limbed shape crawled out from between two closeleaning piles of books. When it stood up, and was revealed to be a man no taller than Utta’s finger, she nearly dropped the torch again.

  “Oh, merciful daughter of Perin,” Utta said. “It is a little man.”

  “No mere man,” the stranger chirped, “but a Gutter-Scout of the Rooftoppers.” He bowed. “Beetledown the Bowman, I hight. Beg pardon for affrighting thee.”

  “You see this too,” Merolanna said, tightening her grip on Utta again until the other woman squirmed. “Sister Utta, you see it. I am not mad, am I?”

  “I see it,” was all she could say. At this moment Utta was not entirely certain of her own sanity. “Who are you?” she asked the tiny man. “I mean, what are you?”

  “He said he was a Rooftopper,” Merolanna said. “That’s plain enough.”

  “A...Rooftopper?”

  “Don’t you know the stories? Ah, but you’re from the Vuttish islands, aren’t you?” Merolanna stared at Utta for a moment, then suddenly remembered what they were talking about and turned back to the astonishing little apparition on the table. “What do you want? Are you the one who...did you put that letter in my chamber?”

  Beetledown bowed. It was hard to tell, he was so small, but he might have been a little shame-faced. “That were my folk, yes, and Beetledown played some part, ’tis also true. We took the letter and we brought it back. Any more, though, be not mine to tell. You must wait.”

  “Wait?” Merolanna’s laugh was more than a little shaky. Utta half feared that the duchess would faint or run screaming, but Merolanna seemed determined to prove she was made of bolder stuff. “Wait for what? The goblins to come and play us a tune? The fairy-king to lead us to his hoard of gold? By the Holy Trigon, are all the stories coming to life?”

  “Again, this one cannot say, great lady. But un comes who can.” He cocked his head. “Ah. I hear her.”

  He pointed to the great, long-unused fireplace. A line of figures had begun to file out from behind a pile of books beside the hearth—tiny men like Beetledown, dressed in fantastical armor made of nut husks and rodent skeletons, carrying equally tiny swords and spears. The miniature troop marched silently across the floor (although not without a few nervous glances upward at Utta and Merolanna) and lined up before the fireplace. A platform descended slowly out of the flue and into the opening of the fireplace, winched down on threads with a feathery squeak like the cry of baby birds. When it was a half-foot above the ash-covered andiron, it stopped, swaying slightly. At the center of the platform, on a beautiful throne constructed in part from what appeared to be a gilded pinecone, sat a finger-sized woman with red hair and a little crown of gold wire. She regarded her two large guests with calm interest, then smiled.

  “Her Sublime and Inextricable Majesty, Queen Upsteeplebat,” announced Beetledown with considerable fervor.

  “We owe you an explanation, Duchess Merolanna and Sister Utta,” said the little queen. The stones of the fireplace, like the shape of a theater or temple, made her high voice easier to hear than the little man’s had been. “We have information that we think you will find valuable, and in turn, we ask you to aid us in the great matters that are upon us all.”

  “Aid you?” Merolanna shook her head. The duchess was looking her age now, confused and even a little weary. “By the gods, I swear I understand none of this. Tiny people out of an old tale. What could we do to help you? And what information could you give us?”

  “For one thing, Duchess,” said the queen gently, as if to a restless child instead of to a woman many, many times her size, “we believe we can tell you what happened to your son.”

  “Are you sure?” Opal asked. “Perhaps you’re still too tired.” His wife, Chert noted, seemed to be having second thoughts.

  “No, Mistress,” Chaven protested, “I am much recovered. In fact, I am ashamed at having let myself go so far last night.” He did indeed look rather embarrassed. “I count you even better friends for your kindness, indulging me at a bad time.”

  “But, are you truly...?” Opal looked at the physician, then at her husband, as though she wanted him to intervene. Chert was quite happy to sit with a sour smile on his face. This messing about with mirrors had been her idea, after all. “Will you really do it here? In our home?”

  Chaven smiled. “Mistress Opal, this is not some great, dangerous experiment I will perform, only the mildest bit of captromancy. Nothing will damage your son or your house.”

  Son. Chert still wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but kept his thoughts to himself. Just in the months since Flint had come to them, the boy had grown another handspan, and now he towered over Chert. How could you consider someone your son who first of all didn’t belong to you, whose mother and father might be alive and living nearby, and who in a few years would be twice your own size?

  Ah, I suppose it isn’t the height but the heart, he thought. He looked at the boy, sitting sleepy-eyed and faintly distrustful, curled in his blanket in the corner he had made his own. At least he’s out of his bed. These days Flint was like some ancient relative—asleep most of the day, barely speaking. The boy had never been talkative, of course, but until the moment he had woken up from his weird adventure in the Mysteries the vigor had practically sprayed off him like a dog shaking a wet coat.

  “What do you need, Doctor?” Chert couldn’t help being a little curious. “Special herbs? Opal could go to the market.”

  “You could go to the market, you old hedgehog,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “No, no.” The physician waved his hand. He looked a bit better for a night’s sleep, but Chert knew him well enough to see the hollowness behind the façade of the ordinary. Chaven Makaros was not a happy man, not remotely, which made Chert even more anxious. “No, I need only Mistress Opal’s mirror and a candle, and...” Chaven frowned. “Can you make this place dark?”

  Chert laughed. “Can we? You forget, you are a guest in FunderlingTown now. Even what we usually walk about in would seem like deep dark to you, and what you think is ordinary light makes my head ache.�
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  Chaven looked stricken. “Is that true? Have you been suffering because of me?”

  He shook his head. “I exaggerate. But yes, of course, we can make it dark.”

  As Chert stood on a stool to douse the lantern burning high in the alcove above the fire, Opal left the room and returned with a single candle in a dish which she set on the table next to Chaven. Already the exchange of the lantern for this single small light had turned the morning into something else, into eerie, timeless twilight, and Chert could not help remembering the murk of Southmarch city across the bay, the ceaseless dripping of water, those armored...things stepping out of the shadows. He had dismissed Opal’s worries about doing this in the house, thinking that she was concerned only about a mess on her immaculate floors, but realized now that something deeper troubled her: by this one act, the lighting of a candle, and the knowledge that more was to come, the day and their house itself had been transformed into something quite different, almost frightening.

  “Now,” said Chaven, “I will need something to prop this mirror—ah, the cup should do nicely. And I want to put the candle here, where it will reflect without being directly in front of him. Flint, that is the boy’s name, yes? Flint, come and sit here at the table. On this bench, yes.”

  The straw-haired boy rose and came forward, looking not so much apprehensive now as confused—and why not, Chert thought: it was an odd thing for parents of any kind to do, foster-folk or not, handing their child over to a strange, bespectacled fellow like this one, a man who might be small among his own kind but here was too big for any of the furniture, then letting him do the Elders knew what to the boy.

  “It’s all right, son,” Chert said abruptly. Flint looked at him, then seated himself.

  “Now, child, I want you to move a little so you can see nothing but the candle.” The boy tilted a bit to the side, then moved the rest of his body at the physician’s gentle direction. Chaven stood behind him.

  “Perhaps you two should move to where he cannot see you,” the physician said to Chert and Opal. “Just stand behind me.”

  “Will this hurt him?” Opal asked suddenly. The boy flinched.

  “No, no, and again, no. No pain, nothing dangerous, only a few questions, a little...conversation.”

  When Opal had taken her place, gripping Chert’s hand tighter than he could remember her doing for some time, Chaven began quietly to speak. “Now, look in the mirror, lad.” It was strange to think this same fellow, so soothing now, had been shrieking like a man caught under a rockslide only a few hours earlier. “Do you see the candle flame? You do. It is there before you, the only bright thing. Look at it. Do not watch anything else, only the flame. See how it moves? See how it glows? The darkness on either side of it is spreading, but the light only grows brighter...”

  Chert couldn’t see Flint’s face, of course—the angle of the mirror didn’t permit it—but he could see the boy’s posture beginning to ease. The bony shoulders, which had been hunched as though against a cold wind, now drooped, and the head tilted forward toward the mirror-candle that Flint could see but Chert could not.

  Chaven continued to talk in this soft, serious way, speaking of the candle and the darkness around it until Chert felt that he was falling into some kind of spell himself, until the pool of light on the tabletop, the candle and Flint and the mirror, all seemed to float in a shadowy void. The physician let his voice trail off into silence.

  “Now,” Chaven said after a pause, “we are going to take a journey together, you and I. Fear nothing that you see because I will be with you. Nothing that you see can see you, or harm you in any way. Do not be afraid.”

  Opal squeezed Chert’s hand so hard he had to wriggle his fingers free. He put his own hand on her arm to let her know he was still there, and also to try to stave off any sudden urges on her part to crush his fingers again.

  “You are a boy again, just a very small boy—a baby, perhaps still in swaddling, and you can barely walk,” Chaven said. “Where are you? What do you see?”

  A long pause was followed by a strange sound—Flint’s voice, but a new one Chert hadn’t yet heard, not the preternatural maturity of the nearly wild boy they had brought home, or the anxious sullenness that had come on him since his journey through the mysteries. This Flint sounded almost exactly like what Chaven had described— a very small child, only just up on his legs.

  “See trees. See my mam.”

  Opal got hold of his hand despite Chert’s best efforts and this time he didn’t have the heart to pull away, despite her desperate grip.

  “And your father? Is he there?” “Han’t got un.”

  “Ah. And what is your name?”

  He waited another long moment before answering. “Boy. Mam calls me boy.”

  “And do you know her name?” “Mam. Ma-ma.”

  There was another spell of silence while Chaven considered. “Very well. You are a little older now. Where do you live?”

  “In my house. Near the wood.” “Do you know its name, this wood?” “No. Only know I mustn’t go there.”

  “And when other people speak to your mother, what do they call her?”

  “Don’t. Don’t none come. Except the city-man. He comes with the money. Four silver seashells each time. She likes it when he comes.”

  Chaven turned and gave Chert and Opal a look that Chert could not identify. “And what does he call her?”

  “Mistress, or goodwife. Once he called her Dame Nursewife.”

  Chaven sighed. “Enough, then. You are now...”

  “She’s not well,” Flint said abruptly, his voice tremulous. “She said, don’t go out, and I don’t. But she’s sleeping and the clouds are coming along the ground.”

  “He’s frightened!” said Opal. Chert had to hold her back, wondering even as he did so whether it was the right thing to do. “Let go of me, old man—can’t you hear him? Flint! Flint, I’m here!”

  “I assure you, good Mistress Opal, he cannot hear you.” Something odd and hard had entered Chaven’s voice—a tone Chert hadn’t heard from him before. “My master Kaspar Dyelos taught this working to me and I learned it well. I assure you, he hears no voice but mine.”

  “But he’s frightened!”

  “Then you must be quiet and let me speak to him,” Chaven said. “Boy, listen to me.”

  “The trees!” Flint said, his voice rising. “The trees are... moving. They have fingers. They’re all around the house, and the clouds are all around too!”

  “You are safe,” the physician said. “You are safe, boy. Nothing you can see can hurt you.”

  “I don’t want to go out. Ma said not to! But the door’s open and the clouds are in the house...!”

  “Boy...”

  Flint’s desperate words came out in little bursts, as though he were running hard. “Not...the...don’t want...” He was swaying on the bench now, boneless as a doll, his head rolling on his neck as though someone were shaking him by the shoulders. “The eyes are all staring! Where’s my ma? Where’s the sky?” He was weeping now. “Where’s my house?”

  “Stop this!” Opal shrieked. “You’re hurting him with your horrible spell!”

  “I assure you,” Chaven said, a little breathless himself, “that while he may be remembering things that frightened him, he’s in no danger...”

  Flint suddenly went rigid on the bench. “He’s not in the stone anymore,” he said in a harsh whisper, throat as tight as if someone squeezed it in strong hands. “He’s not just in the stone—he’s...in...me!” The child fell silent, still stiff as a post.

  “We are done now, boy,” Chaven said after a long moment of stunned silence. “Come back to your home. Come back here, to the candle, and the mirror, come back to Opal and Chert...”

  Flint stood up so suddenly that he tipped the heavy bench over. It crashed onto Chaven’s foot and the physician hopped back on one leg, cursing unintelligibly, then fell over.

  “No!” Flint shouted, and his voice
filled the small room, rattled from the stone walls. “The queen’s heart! The queen’s heart! It’s a hole, and he’s crawling through it...!”

  And then he went limp and fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

  “He only sleeps.” Chaven spoke gently, an unspoken apology behind the words, but Opal was having nothing of it; the look on her face could have crumbled limestone. She angrily waved Chaven and her husband from the sleeping room so she could continue dabbing the boy’s forehead with a wet cloth, as if the mere fact of their presence would compromise her healing abilities—or, as Chert thought more likely, as though the very sight of two such useless men made her feel ill.

  “I do not know what happened,” Chaven said to Chert as they turned the bench right-side-up and sat on it. Chert poured them both a mug of mossbrew out of a jug. “Never before...” He frowned. “Something has been done to that boy. Behind the Shadowline, perhaps.”

  Chert laughed, but it was not one of the pleasant kind. “We did not need any mirror-magic to know that.”

  “Yes, yes, but there is more here than I ever thought. You heard him. He did not merely wander across the Shadowline—he was taken. Something strange was done to him there, I have no doubt.”

  Chert thought of the boy as he had found him just days before, lying at the foot of the Shining Man at the very center of the Funderling Mysteries, with the little mirror clutched in his fingers. And then that terrifying fairy-woman had taken the mirror from Chert in turn. What was it all about? Was she the queen the boy was shouting about? He had said something about a hole, and Chert could see how a heart with a hole in it might describe her.

  “I don’t understand,” Chaven said. “Not any of it. But I cannot help feeling that I need to.”

  “Well enough.” Chert stood, wincing at the ache in his knees. “Me, I have more pressing things to worry about, like where we are going to go and how we are going to find something to eat without anyone noticing you.” “What are you talking about?” Chaven asked.

  “Because not only isn’t Opal going to feed us today,” Chert told him, “I think it’s pretty plain that you and I will be a lot healthier if we’re not sitting here when she comes out.”