Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  He felt his breath catch in his chest. That’s not...Briony wouldn’t...!

  A cold wave of surprise and fear suddenly washed over him and he found himself staring into the coldly gleaming eyes of Ueni’ssoh once more.

  A tiny smile curled the slate-colored lips. “So. Stronger than I would have guessed, and with some...interesting flavors. What about the other sunlander? Might he prove a little less stubborn?”

  The gray man abruptly swiveled to look at Gyir, as if he felt some movement from his direction. “No, I will not strive with you, Storm Lantern—not yet. I will enjoy that too much, and I like to anticipate my pleasures.” The cadaverous face turned to Ferras Vansen and Barrick felt himself abruptly released, as if a powerful hand had let go of the nape of his neck. He slumped helplessly to his knees as Vansen trudged past him and then stopped before the black-robed man like an obedient servant.

  After staring at the guardsman for several heartbeats, Ueni’ssoh raised his hand. Vansen swayed and crumpled to the floor.

  “Interesting,” Ueni’ssoh said, showing long, narrow teeth as gray as his skin. “You both shield yourself with the thought of the same female. I shall ponder on this.” He turned and glided out of the low-ceilinged chamber, followed by the bestial guards. The door slammed, plunging the room into almost complete darkness as the bolt rattled home.

  What will they do with us? Barrick asked Gyir, but the faceless warrior did not answer him. “What’s going to happen?” Barrick finally said aloud. “Are...are they going to kill us?”

  “Even if they keep us alive,” Vansen said grimly, “I doubt we’ll like it much.”

  I said you two should be silent and I meant it. Gyir’s anger blew into Barrick’s head like a winter wind. We are in terrible danger and every word you speak aloud is a risk.

  But you won’t talk to me! Barrick knew it sounded petty, but he didn’t care. What had happened to the Barrick Eddon of a few days ago, when he had not cared whether he was alive or dead? You just sit there.

  I am not being silent out of some ill humor, Gyir told him. I am...testing myself. And thinking. What does that mean?

  Stop. Gyir closed his eyes. Let me be alone with my thoughts, boy. Otherwise, the lives of far more than we three may be forfeit.

  Miserable and terrified, with no room to pace, Barrick could only sit and breathe in the dreadful, stretching silence.

  Prince Barrick had fallen asleep at last, for which Vansen was grateful. Gyir stirred and then, in one smoothly nimble motion, rose to his feet—impressive, considering he had been sitting on the hard stone for hours.

  Are they just older than us, these fairies, and schooled in different ways? Vansen wondered. Is it all tricks of magic they’ve learned? Or are they truly stronger and better than we are in everything? He would never be able to forget the way the Twilight People had slashed through his men at Kolkan’s Field like wolves through pampered house dogs.

  Gyir moved to the door of the cell and stood close to the grille, looking out into the larger prison room beyond.

  Is someone coming? Vansen was beginning to feel disturbingly comfortable with this unspeaking speech.

  The fairy lifted his pale hand. Quiet.

  Rebuked, Vansen clambered to his feet to see for himself, but Gyir waved him back. The fairy was doing more than observing, Vansen realized: Gyir had an expression of fierce concentration in his narrowed eyes, and, as the torchlight from the door grille moved across the fairy’s face Vansen could even see veins bulging at the sides of the Storm Lantern’s ivory brow.

  Ferras Vansen watched as the fairy looked from one side of the chamber to the other. Gyir’s gaze lit on one of the larger, more human-looking prisoners, manlike but shaggy and yellow as a buttercup, with long, splay-toed feet and a starry snout like a burrowing mole. The creature raised its head and looked around with nothing more than slow curiosity at first, but then began to twitch as though beset by flying insects. It grabbed at its ears as if to shut out some loud noise, then staggered upright and lurched toward Gyir and the bronze door.

  The yellow fairy stopped, its flowerlike muzzle only inches from the grille, its eyes wide. Gyir lifted a hand and its eyes fell shut, then he extended his long fingers through the bars until he could touch the creature lightly on the forehead, then he closed his own eyes.

  For long moments they stood that way, unmoving, as if sharing some ancient ritual. At last the yellow fairy took an awkward step backward, shook its head, then turned and walked away without a backward glance. Gyir stood watching it for a moment before he swayed and collapsed.

  Ferras Vansen caught the fairy as he fell, grunting at the weight, although Gyir was lighter than his size would have suggested. As he lowered the Storm Lantern to the cell floor Vansen could not help noticing the fairy’s smell, an odd mixture of ocean tang, leather, and cloying, flowery scents.

  Fear not—I will survive. There was a dry edge to Gyir’s thoughts which Vansen recognized as amusement. Just let me rest.

  What did you do?

  Must rest. The fairy did not even lay his head on his arm— the red eyes simply shut.

  Prince Barrick had awakened by the time Gyir sat up again, rubbing his head as though it ached. “What have you two done?” the boy demanded of Vansen. “He won’t tell me.” Vansen had no doubt the prince was speaking aloud to irritate Gyir, and couldn’t help wondering if the boy’s father had ever simply taken Barrick over his knee and given him a good thrashing.

  “I couldn’t tell you, Highness, because I didn’t understand it myself.”

  I have asked several times for silence. I will not ask again. Gyir’s brow wrinkled, which was his way of frowning. Listen. Outside their tiny cell Vansen could hear the growling of the guards and the moans and shrills of protesting prisoners.

  They are harrying the next gang out to work and I must... narrow my thoughts. Deepen them. I am going to look through the eyes of one of them—the yellow one that Captain Vansen saw. I will see what he does, where he goes, and discover something of this place.

  Vansen was puzzled. But I thought you were...crippled, you said. By what those Followers did to you.

  I have recovered, somewhat. In fact, I think my recovery was caused, or at least hastened, by being in the presence of Jikuyin, battered by his voice. It would be nice to think that in capturing and imprisoning us, he has unwittingly given me back something of myself. He paused, clearly listening to something Barrick was saying.

  I do not know if I have the strength, Gyir said at last. Then: Very well, you may be right. I will try. But if I grow too weak, I will cut the rope, as it were, and let the two of you fall away rather than give up my own connection.

  What does that mean? Try what? Vansen asked, careful not to speak aloud again.

  The young prince wants me to let you both see what I see through the eyes of the prisoner.

  Can you really do that?

  The fairy sat down with his back against the door, then beckoned Vansen and the prince toward him. Take my hands and close your eyes, shut out all distraction. He extended one long hand toward Vansen and the other toward Barrick, palms up, white fingers curled like the petals of water flowers. Go—take it.

  Vansen did and was bemused to find nothing different, other than the obviously strange situation of holding the fairy’s chill, smooth hand.

  No, you must shut out distraction. If you look around, if you squirm, if you even think too much, you make it more difficult for me to hold everything in my thoughts.

  Vansen did his best to comply. At first he saw nothing except the floating sparks that usually populated the darkness behind closed lids. Then one of the sparks began to grow, its glow swelling, until it pushed out the blackness and filled his mind’s eye.

  It was more than just sight, though, he realized as the great door swung open before him and he followed the small, hairy back of another prisoner out into the passageway. He thought he could even feel something of the yellow creature’s thoughts, alth
ough they were as strange to him as trying to hear meaning in birdsong. The thing he was inhabiting longed helplessly for home, an ache Vansen understood, but “home” to this creature seemed to mean deep woods and tangling leaves and the silver of snailtracks undisturbed on a damp forest floor. The thing had a name, too—something like “Praise-Sweet-Lisiya’s-Grace,” as far as Vansen could tell. It was terribly frightened, but had dissolved its fear in a passivity he could not understand, a certainty that nothing would change or even could change, that it could only follow what was before it, from meal to miserable meal and from one command to the next, unless something came at last to change this nightmare, even if that something was death itself.

  It was a chilling way to feel, worse still to experience such hopelessness as if it were his own. Vansen did not try to sample any of the river of memories that ran just beneath the slow, awkward thoughts. He wanted only to get out of the creature’s thoughts entirely, as quickly as he could—he hated being in this trapped, pathetic, doomed thing...!

  Something wrapped around him, soothing him as a parent would a child. It was Gyir, acting not out of pity, but because Vansen’s discomfort was affecting the fairy’s own composure. Vansen felt a wash of shame and did his best to choke down his discomfort and fear. Just watch, he told himself. Be strong. It’s not me. This thing is not me. But it was more frightening than he would ever have guessed to be trapped in someone else’s body.

  The line of prisoners trudged downward through several sloping corridors and once down a flight of spiral steps so long that Vansen feared he would soon be seeing the face of Immon the immortal gatekeeper. In these depths they could better hear the thunderous sounds that had rumbled up to the prisoner chamber. They were not constant, or even regular, but every hundred dragging steps or so a loud thump seemed to rattle the very stone around them.

  They passed dozens of the hairy guards and hundreds of other prisoners returning from the depths, most of the groups as queerly mixed as their own, but some more obviously collected for a certain limited task, like the group of short, heavy-muscled creatures with heads sunk deep between their huge shoulders, each one carrying a bronze pick like a spearman marching to war. The most chilling thing about these squat diggers was not their silence or their faintly luminous, mushroom-colored skin, but the absence of eyes in the crude faces nestling just above their breastbones.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs at last, the guards marched the yellow fairy and his companions through a few more corridors and down one last slope, then through a heavy wooden door. A wheeled cart the size of a large hay wain stood untended in a chamber slightly bigger than the one in which the prisoners were housed, its wheels sunk deep into tracks through what looked like centuries worth of dust. At the far end of the chamber was an open door large enough for the cart to pass through, with only darkness visible behind. At the near end of the room a shaft led straight down, with a system of large pulleys strung above it and ropes cobwebbing down into the measureless depths.

  Vansen did his best to understand what he was seeing through the forest-fairy’s eyes, but could make little sense of it. Were they supposed to take something from the door at one end and then lower it down the shaft? Gold? Jewels? Or did the exchange more likely go the other way around, the dirt and rubble from the mine’s digging, source of all this dust, sent aboveground for disposal?

  The brutish guards finished herding the rest of the prisoners into the room but did not stop to give directions, if they were even capable of such a thing. Instead, a few of the shaggy, club-wielding creatures stayed behind to guard the prisoners—it was hard to tell exactly how many, since the star-nosed yellow fairy was doing his best to avoid eye contact with any of them—while the rest trooped out of the chamber. Whatever their work might be, the prisoners did not immediately spring to it, and the remaining guards did not seem to expect them to do so. The yellow fairy and his companions waited in attitudes of dull patience, but they did not have to wait long.

  Vansen felt rather than heard a ragged sound—a shout from below—and most of the prisoners hurried to the pulleys above the deep, square pit, while others went to bring the wagon nearer. The slaves hauling on the ropes grunted and moaned until they had hauled a huge wooden basket up from the unseen depths, then they swung the basket out on a hinged arm until it dangled over the bed of the huge wagon. When they tipped it down several dozen corpses fell out in a limply flopping heap.

  Vansen almost lost his grip on Gyir, or the fairy nearly lost his hold on Vansen.

  One of bodies slid off the top of the pile and tumbled onto the stone floor beside the cart wheel, limp as a grain sack. The yellow fairy bent with another prisoner to lift the body— in life it had been a goblin, Vansen guessed, although the small creature’s hairy pelt was so caked with dust it was hard to be certain. There were no obvious marks of violence, at least not anything fatal: long weals ran across the dead goblin’s back, crisscrossed through the fur like roads being swallowed by undergrowth, but the skin had scarred long ago: it had not been the whipping that had killed this creature.

  The yellow forest-fairy went about its grisly chores as though sleepwalking, which was just as well, since Ferras Vansen found it hard to watch what the creature was doing. It wrestled another fallen body back onto the cart, a bumpyskinned corpse of the star-nosed thing’s own type, with blood on its face but no other sign of violence. Vansen caught only the briefest moment of hesitation as the creature saw one of its own kind, then it turned away without looking at the face, pulling an emptiness over its thoughts that Vansen could feel. Nevertheless, it did not linger beside the corpse of its star-nosed kin, but walked around the back of the cart just as the creaking vehicle began to roll away from the pit. The yellow fairy bent one last time to pick up the corpse of a hard-shelled creature whose half-closed eyes and sagging mouth were the only parts of its face not covered by leathery plates of skin. The buglike thing was clearly heavier than the yellow fairy had expected; after a moment’s struggle, he decided to drag it instead of trying to lift it. As he pulled it scraping across the floor one of the other prisoners came to help—something that Vansen found oddly touching—and together they heaved the shelled thing back onto the cart.

  Beyond the doorway at the chamber’s far end, a more or less level track led away into darkness. Within a few hundred paces the track grew deep with dust and the wagon slowed, then stopped. The yellow fairy and several other prisoners stepped up and pushed until it the wheels came free and began to roll again. Another thumping crash shook the cavern—Vansen could not hear it so much as he could see the way it knocked the yellow fairy and everything around him off-kilter—and for a moment the eyes through which he was looking stared straight down into nothingness: on the left side the path dropped away and the shadows stretched so deep the torchlight could not find their ending.

  The prisoners steered the heavy cart very slowly around a bend in the track, trying not to let themselves or the wagon get too near the edge. Even so, one small captive was caught between the front wheel and the edge of the track; with a scream Vansen could barely hear, although he knew it must be hideously shrill in the yellow fairy’s ears, the little creature was swept off into darkness. The rest of the prisoners stopped, frightened and miserable, but blows from the guards’ clubs quickly set them moving again.

  After they had finally coaxed the wagon around the difficult bend, they found themselves face-to-face with more of the hairy beast-guards coming along the track toward them. This group had scarves wrapped around their faces so that only their tiny eyes could be seen, which made them even more ominously strange. These new ape-things did not like to see their way blocked by the cart, and pointed forked spears at the prisoners, gesturing and grunting angrily until the yellow fairy and his comrades shrank back against the cliff face and let the masked creatures shove by. When they were gone, the woodsprite and his fellow prisoners laboriously heaved the corpse-wagon into motion again.

  The par
t of Vansen that still thought as Vansen had wondered why they should be traveling so far, and where the bodies were being taken. Now he learned. As the wagon creaked onward the light grew stronger: there was clearly some other source besides the torches high on the walls above the narrow path. Only another hundred yards or farther the path turned and then turned again. The light and the sickening smell bloomed, and those prisoners who still wore rags of clothing tried to cover noses and mouths. The yellow fairy could do nothing except spread his hand over his muzzle, squeezing the star-shaped protuberance closed like a parent wrapping his fist around a child’s hand. Even through the curious dislocation of Gyir’s spell, Vansen could smell rotting flesh—the true stench must have been almost beyond belief.

  For a moment Vansen could feel not just the woodsprite’s dull horror, and his own, but a flare of despair and dread from Prince Barrick as well, as though the boy were standing just beside him, or even just inside him. Barrick was fighting to get away, somehow, pushing back from the scene that stretched before them in the billowing firelight. Vansen felt Gyir’s connection to them all grow thin.

  No! Gyir’s thoughts came like hammer blows. Do not turn away! Wait!

  Dozens of guards, many in sacklike hooded robes that covered them almost entirely, swarmed along the floor of the vast cavern, which was little more than a shelf around a huge, open pit full of corpses, thousands of dead creatures of all kinds and sizes. Dirt brought in on ore carts by other guards was being shoveled in on top of the uppermost bodies. Fires burned everywhere, great bonfires at each corner of the huge hole and smaller fires tended by the guards in several of the wider places on the shelf around the pit, meant to disperse or consume the stench. The smoke and sparks swirled upward, and the heat of the fires and the air drawn in from the corridors that emptied into the pit chamber on all sides made the stinking winds rush in circles around the cavern before at last rising upward into the darkness of the cavern’s roof.

  No. So many...! It is... Vansen did not know if the thoughts were his own now or Barrick’s, or perhaps even Gyir’s. All he knew was that the terrible sight blurred before him as if his eyes were filling with tears, then it all flew away into darkness and he was back in his own frail body once more, sprawled on the floor of the cell beside Gyir and Barrick, weak, ill, and horrorstricken.