Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  I should be settled back to carve soapstone and watch grandchildren play. But we never had children. He thought of Flint, strange Flint. Until now, I suppose.

  Cinnabar’s bulky form filled the doorway. “Ho, Master Blue Quartz. I’ve come on my way back from quarry, as I promised.”

  “Come in, Magister. It is kind of you.”

  Opal was already waiting by the best chair with a cup of blueroot tea. “I am mortified to have visitors with the house in this state—especially you, Magister. You do us an honor.”

  Cinnabar waved his hand. “Vistiting the most famous citizen of Funderling Town? Seems to me I’m the one being honored with an audience.” He took a small sip of the tea to test it, then blew on it.

  “Famous...?” Chert frowned. Cinnabar had a rough and ready sense of humor, but the way he’d said it didn’t sound like a joke.

  “First you find the boy himself, then when he runs away you bring him back with one of the Metamorphic Brothers holding the litter? Big folk visitors in and out? And I hear rumors even of the Rooftoppers, the little folk out of the old tales. Chert, if anyone in the town is not talking about you and Opal, they would have to be as ignorant as a blindshrew.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear,” Opal said, although there was a strange undertone of something almost like pride in it. “Would you like some more tea, Magister?”

  “No, I’ve still got supper waiting at home for me, Mistress Opal. It’s one thing to work late, but to come home to Quicksilver House without an appetite after my woman’s been in the kitchen all afternoon is just asking for trouble. Perhaps you could tell me what’s on your minds, if I’m not rushing you?”

  Chert smiled. How different this fellow was from Chert’s own brother, who was also a Magister: Nodule Blue Quartz was not nearly so important as Cinnabar in Funderling Town, but you would never know it from the airs Nodule put on. But Cinnabar—you couldn’t fail to like a man who was so easy in himself, so uninterested in position or rank. Chert felt a little bad for what he was about to do.

  “I’ll get to the point, then, Magister,” he said. “It’s about our visitor. I need your help.”

  “Problems with the boy?” Cinnabar actually looked mildly concerned.

  “Not the boy—or at least that’s not the visitor we mean.” He raised his voice. “You can come out now, Chaven!”

  The physician had to bend at the waist to make his way through the doorway of the bedchamber, where he had been sitting with Flint. Even with his head bowed so as not to touch the ceiling, he loomed almost twice Cinnabar’s height.

  “Good evening, Magister,” he said. “I think we have met.” “By the oldest Deeps.” Cinnabar was clearly amazed. “Chaven Makaros, isn’t it? You’re the physician—the one who’s supposed to be dead.”

  “There are many who would like that to be true,” said Chaven with a rueful smile, “but so far they have not had their wish granted.”

  Cinnabar turned to his hosts. “You surprise me again. But what is this to me?”

  “To all of us, I’m beginning to think,” said Chert. “My bracing can’t take the weight of all these secrets any longer, Magister. I need your help.”

  The head of the Quicksilver clan looked up at the physician, then back at Chert. “I’ve always thought you a good and honest man, Blue Quartz. Talk to me. I will listen. That much at least I can promise.”

  When Ludis saw that his visitor had arrived, the Lord Protector of Hierosol gestured for his military commanders to leave. The black-cloaked officers rolled up their charts of the citadel’s defenses, bowed, and departed, but not without a few odd glances at the prisoner.

  Ludis Drakava and his guest were not left entirely alone, of course: besides the Golden Enomote, half a pentecount of soldiers who never left the lord protector’s presence even when he slept, and who stood now at attention along the throne room walls, the lord protector also had his personal bodyguards, a pair of huge Kracian wrestlers who stood cross-armed and impassive on either side of the Green Chair. (The massive jade throne of Hierosol was reputed to have belonged to the great Hiliometes, the Worm-Slayer himself, and certainly was big enough to have seated a demigod. In recent centuries, more human-sized emperors had removed much of the throne’s lower foundation so they could sit with their feet close enough to the ground to spare their pride.) Ludis, a former mercenary himself, was broad enough in chest and shoulders to mount the Green Chair without looking like a child. He had once been lean and muscled as a heroic statue, but now even the light armor that he wore instead of the robes of nobility—perhaps to remind his subjects he had won the throne by force and would not give it up any other way—could not hide the thickness around his middle, nor could his spadelike beard completely obscure his softening jaw.

  Ludis beckoned the prisoner forward as he seated himself on the uncushioned jade. “Ah, King Olin.” He had the rasping voice of a man who had been shouting orders in the chaos of battle all his grown life. “It is good to see you. We should not be strangers.”

  “What should we be?” asked the prisoner, but without obvious rancor.

  “Equals. Rulers thrown together by circumstance, but with an understanding of what ruling means.”

  “You mean I should not despise you for holding me prisoner.”

  “Holding you for ransom. A common enough practice.” Ludis clapped his hands and a servant appeared, dressed in the livery of House Drakava, a tunic decorated with a stylized picture of a red-eyed ram, a coat of arms that had not been hanging in the Herald’s Hall quite as many years as the other great family crests. You can make yourself emperor in one day, warned an old Hierosoline saying, but it takes five centuries to make yourself respectable. “Wine,” commanded Ludis. “And for you, Olin?”

  He shrugged. “Wine. One thing at least; I know you will not poison me.”

  Ludis laughed and pawed at his beard. “No, no indeed! A waste of a valuable prize, that would be!” He flicked his hand at the servant. “You heard him. Go.” He settled himself, pulling the furry mantle close around his shoulders. “It is cold, this sea wind. We plainsmen never get used to it. Are your rooms warm enough?”

  “I am as comfortable as I could be any place with iron bars on the doors and windows.”

  “You are always welcome at my table. There are no bars on the dining hall.”

  “Just armed guards.” Olin smiled a little. “You will forgive me. I cannot seem to lose my reluctance to break bread with the man who is holding me prisoner while my kingdom is in peril.”

  The servant returned. Ludis Drakava reached up and took a goblet from the tray. “Or would you like to choose first?”

  “As I said.” Olin took the other goblet and sipped. “Xandian?”

  “From Mihan. The last of the stock. I suppose they will make that foul, sweet Xixian stuff now.” Ludis drank his off in one swallow and wiped his mouth. “Perhaps you scorn my invitations because you are a king and I am only a usurper —a peasant with an army.” His voice remained pleasant, but something had changed. “Kings, if they must be ransomed, like to be ransomed by other kings.”

  Olin stared at him for a long moment before replying. “Beggaring my people for ransom is bad enough, Drakava. But you want my daughter.”

  “There are worse matches she could make. But I am told her whereabouts are...unknown at the present. You are running out of heirs, King Olin, although I also hear your newest wife has whelped successfully. Still, an infant prince, helpless in the hands of...what is their name...the Tolly family...?”

  “If I did not have reasons already to wish to put my sword through you,” said Olin evenly, “you would have just given me several. And you will never have my daughter. May the gods forgive me, but it would be better if she truly is dead instead of your slave. If I had known then what I know about you now I would have hanged myself before allowing you even to suggest such a match.”

  The lord protector’s eyebrow rose. “Ah? Really?” “I have heard of what happens to the women
brought to your chambers—no, the girls. Young girls.”

  Ludis Drakava laughed. “Have you? Perhaps as you curse me for a monster you will tell me what your own interest is in girl-children, Olin of Southmarch. I hear you have developed a...friendship with the daughter of Count Perivos.”

  Olin, still standing, bent and put down his goblet on the floor, sloshing a little wine onto the marble tiles. “I think I would like to go back to my rooms now. To my prison.”

  “My question strikes too close to home?”

  “All the gods curse you, Drakava, Pelaya Akuanis is a child. She reminds me of my own daughter—not that you would understand such a thing. She has been kind to me. We talk occasionally in the garden, with guards and her maids present. Even your foul imagination cannot make that into anything unseemly.”

  “Ah, perhaps, perhaps. But that does not explain the little Xixian girl.”

  “What?” Olin looked startled, even took a step back. His foot tipped over the goblet and the dregs pooled on the floor.

  “Surely you don’t think you can meet with a chambermaid, or laundry-maid, or whatever that little creature is, let alone my castle steward, without my knowing it. If such a thing happened I would have to poison all my spies like rats and start over.” He brayed a laugh. “I am not such a fool as you think me, Southmarch!”

  “It was curiosity only.” Olin took a deep breath; when he spoke again his voice was even. “She resembled someone, or so I thought, and I asked to meet her. I was wrong. She is nothing.”

  “Perhaps.” Ludis clapped for the servant again, who came in with an ewer of wine and refilled the lord protector’s cup. He saw the goblet on the floor and looked accusingly at Olin, but did not move to clean it up. “Tell the guards to bring in the envoy,” Ludis ordered the man, then turned back to his captive. “Perhaps all is as you say. Perhaps. In any case, I think you will find this interesting.”

  The man who came in, accompanied by another halfpentecount of the lord protector’s Rams, was hugely fat, his thighs rubbing against each other beneath his sumptuous silk robes so that he swayed when he walked like an overpacked donkey. His head and eyebrows were shaved and he wore on his chest a gold medallion in the shape of a flaming eye. He paused when he reached the foot of the throne and looked at Olin with casual suspicion, like someone who had spent most of his life making quick decisions on court precedent and disliked seeing anyone he could not quickly put into an appropriate list in his head.

  “Pay no attention to my...counselor,” Ludis Drakava told the fat man. “Read me your letter again.”

  The envoy bowed his huge, shiny head, and held up a beribboned scroll of vellum, then began to recite its contents in the high tones of a child.

  “From Sulepis Bishakh am-Xis III, Elect of Nushash, the Golden One, Master of the Great Tent and the Falcon Throne, Lord of All Places and Happenings, may He live forever, to Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hierosol and the Kracian Territories.

  “It has come to Our attention that you hold prisoner one Olin Eddon, king of the northern country called Southmarch. We, in our divine wisdom, would like to speak with this man and have him as Our guest. Should you send him to Us, or arrange for him to return with Favored Bazilis, Our messenger, We will reward you handsomely and also look kindly on you in the future. It could even be that, should Hierosol someday find itself part of Our living kingdom (as is the manifest wish of the great god Nushash) that you, Ludis Drakava, will receive a guarantee of safety and high position for yourself in Our glorious empire.

  “Should you refuse to give him to Us, though, you will incur Our gravest displeasure.”

  “And it is signed by His sacred hand, and stamped with the great Seal of the Son of the Sun,” the eunuch finished, letting the vellum roll closed with a flourish. “Do you have an answer for my immortal master, Lord Protector?”

  “I will give you one by morning, never fear,” said Ludis. “You may go now.”

  The huge man looked at him sternly, as at a child who seeks to shirk responsibility, but allowed himself to be led out again by the soldiers.

  Soon the throne room was empty again of all save Olin and Ludis and the bodyguards. “So, will you give him what he wants?” Olin asked.

  Ludis Drakava laughed hard again. His cheeks were red, his eyes only a little less so. He had been drinking for much of the afternoon, it seemed. “He is readying his fleet, the Autarch—that poisonous, eunuch-loving child. He will be coming soon. The only question is, why does he want you?”

  The northern king shrugged. “How could I know? They say this Sulepis is even more of a madman than his father Parnad was.”

  “Yes, but why you? In fact, how did it come to his attention that you are my...guest?”

  “It’s hardly a secret.” Olin smiled in an ugly way. “You have made sure that all of Eion knows I am your prisoner.”

  “Yes. But it is also interesting this should come so soon after you spoke with that Xixian girl. Could your innocent meeting have been an opportunity for you to...send a message?”

  “Are you mad?” Olin took a step toward the Green Chair.

  The two huge guards unfolded their arms and stared at him. He stopped, fists clenched. “Why would I want to put myself into such a madman’s hands? I have fought him and his father for years—I would be fighting them now, if you and cursed Hesper had not conspired to take me prisoner in Jellon.” He slapped his hands together in frustration. “Besides, I spoke to that girl only a few days ago—how could any message go back and forth to Xis so swiftly?”

  The lord protector inclined his head. “All that you say seems reasonable.” He seemed satisfied merely to have angered Olin. “But that does not mean it is true. These are unreasonable times, as you should well know, with your own castle attacked by changelings and goblins.” He looked up, fixing Olin with his reddened eyes. “Let me tell you this— you belong to Ludis. I bought you, and I will keep you. If I sell you, I alone will profit. And if the Autarch of Xix somehow manages to knock down the citadel walls, I will make sure with my last breath that he does not get you. Not alive, anyway.” The master of Hierosol waved his hand. “You may go back to your chambers now to read your books and flirt with the chambermaids, Eddon.” He clapped his hands and the prisoner’s guards appeared from outside the throne room door. “Take him out.”

  The minutely carved roof of the cavern that shielded Funderling Town was renowned throughout Eion. In better times people actually traveled up from distant countries like Perikal and the Devonisian islands just to see the fantastical forest of stone, the loving work of at least a dozen generations of Funderlings.

  The ceiling of the House of the Stonecutters’ Guild was not so famous, and certainly nowhere near so large, but was in its own way just as stupefying a piece of art. In a natural concavity on the underside of Southmarch Castle’s foundation slab a combination of limestone, cloudy quartz, beams of ancient black ironwood and the Funderlings’ own matchless skills had been crafted into something the gods themselves might envy.

  Chert had seen it many times, of course—his grandfather had been part of the team which had performed its last major repairs—but even so it never failed to impress him. Staring up at it from his lonely position at the ceremonial Outcrop, the ceiling seemed a window through quartz crystal and limestone clouds to some distant part of heaven, but those clouds were braced with great spars of ironwood far too thick and workmanlike to be merely ornamental. It was only when the viewer’s eyes adjusted to the darkness (which grew paradoxically greater as the empty space ascended) that he saw the robed and masked figure surrounded by smaller robed and veiled figures, all seated upside down at the apex, glaring down from the vault, and he realized that the view was not that of someone looking up, but looking down into the depths of the earth—a great tunnel leading downward into the J’ezh’kral Pit, domain of the Lord of the Hot, Wet Stone— Kernios, as the big folk called him.

  But of course, the true cleverness of the room was ben
eath the viewer’s feet—something Chert had time to appreciate now as he waited for the noisy reaction to his last words to die down. The Magisters’ semicircle of benches and the four stone chairs they faced sat around the edge of a huge mirror of silvered mica, so that everything above was reflected below. Chert and the others seemed to be sitting around the rim of the great Pit itself, looking down into the very eyes of their god. To approach the Highwardens was to seem to walk on nothing above the living depths of Creation.

  It was disconcerting at the best of times. Tonight, with the whole Guild joined together to judge Chert’s actions, it was downright frightening.

  “You did what?” His own brother, Nodule, was predictably leading the charge against him. “You cannot imagine the shame I feel, that one of our family...”

  “Please, Magister,” said Cinnabar. “No one here has even determined that anything wrong’s been done, let alone that Chert has brought shame to the Blue Quartz family.”

  “To the entire Quartz clan!” cried Bloodstone, Magister of the Smoke Quartz branch. Fat and bulging-eyed, he was an ally of Nodule’s and quick to join Chert’s brother in most things—including, it seemed, in being horrified by what Chert had done. He was not alone: the Magisters of the Black, Milk, and Rose Quartz families had also been grumbling all through Chert’s appearance at the Outcrop.

  Nice to see my family hurrying to my aid. Chert could only hope that the silence of the other members of the large Quartz clan augured more open minds.

  “Strangers in the Mysteries?” Bloodstone shook his head in apparent amazement. “Big folk hiding from their rightful lords here in Funderling Town? What madness have you brought to us, Chert?”

  “Your concern has been noted,” said Cinnabar, sounding as though he meant the opposite. As Magister of his own Quicksilver family and one of the most important leaders of all Metal House—most thought he would someday replace old Quicklime Pewter as one of the four Great Highwardens, the most exalted of Funderling honors—he was a good ally to have. On top of everything else, he was also fair and sensible. “Perhaps,” he said now, “we should see if any of the other Magisters or our noble Highwardens have questions before we start shouting about shame and tradition.”