Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  Merolanna looked at Utta with surprise. “Do you mean Brother Okros? The castle is full of dangers, dear—just the Tollys alone are enough to give someone nightmares—but Brother Okros is as harmless as milk. Trust me.”

  “I’ll have to, won’t I?” said Utta, but she could not stay angry with her friend for more than a few moments. She took Merolanna’s elbow, letting the older woman lean on her as they walked back through powdery snow in swiftly darkening afternoon.

  Even with a dumb brute like this it will not be as easy as prying at unprotected thoughts, Gyir said. I must have silence just to bring him to the door of our cell.

  Barrick was only too happy to comply. He was already regretting his insistence. The memory of being trapped in the woodsprite’s dull, hopeless thoughts, of handling corpses like they were discarded bits of clothing dropped on the floor, still roiled his stomach and made him lightheaded.

  A bestial, leathery face appeared in the grille, the brow so bony and low that Barrick could not even see the creature’s eyes. It grunted and then snarled, angered by something, but was clearly compelled to remain where it was.

  Gyir stood eye-to-eye with it for what seemed to Barrick like a terribly long time, in a silence broken only by the occasional pained cry of a prisoner in the other chamber. The guard-beast swayed but could not free itself from Gyir. The fairy stood almost motionless, but Barrick could sense a little of the tides of compulsion and resistance flowing back and forth between the two of them. At last the creature made a strange, rough-throated noise that could have been a gasp of pain. Gyir wiped sweat from his pale brow with his sleeve, then turned toward them.

  I have him, now.

  Barrick stared at the guard, whose tiny eyes, rolled up behind half-open lids, had finally become visible as slivers of white. But if you’ve mastered him, couldn’t he free us? Help us to escape?

  He is only a minion—one who brings food. He has no keys for this inner cell. Only Ueni’ssoh has those. But this dull savage may yet give us better aid than any key. Sit down. I will show you something of his thoughts, his sight, as I send him on his way.

  Even as Barrick settled himself on the hard stone floor, the guard turned and staggered away across the outer cell. Prisoners scurried to avoid him, but he walked past them as though they were invisible.

  Gyir’s presence pressed on Barrick’s thoughts. He closed his eyes. At first he could see nothing but red darkness, then it slowly began to resolve into shapes he could recognize—a door swinging open, a corridor stretching out beyond.

  Barrick could feel very little of the creature’s own thoughts beyond the muted jumble of perceptions, of sight and sound, and he wondered whether that was because the guards were not much more than mindless beasts. No. The fairy’s voice came swiftly and clearly: Gyir truly had gained strength. Barrick could even feel Vansen’s presence beside him in the beast’s thoughts, like someone breathing at his own shoulder. He is not just an animal, Gyir said. Even the animals are not just animals in the way you are thinking. But I have quashed his mind with my own as best I can, so that he will do what we like and not remember it afterward.

  The guard-beast trudged down into the depths, a long journey that took him far beneath even the level of the corpse-room. Despite the odd gait forced on him by Gyir’s awkward control of his movements, he was avoided by prisoners and the other guards barely seemed to acknowledge his existence. They might not be mere beasts, Barrick decided, but even among their own kind they showed little life. For the first time it occurred to him that maybe these large, apelike guards were, in their own way, prisoners just as he and his companions were.

  Every few hundred paces something boomed and rumbled in the depths, a noise Barrick could feel more than hear through the creature’s muffled perceptions.

  What is that noise? It sounds like thunder—or cannons!

  You are closer with the second. Gyir was silent for a moment as the creature stumbled, then righted itself. It is Crooked’s Fire, or at least so we call it. Your people call it gun-flour.

  Then they truly are shooting off cannons down there?

  No. I suspect they are using it to dig. Now let me concentrate.

  Down and down and down they went, until the guard-beast reached a room where corpses were being loaded into the huge corpse basket to be winched to the top by more of the neckless, mushroom-colored men. The dead were being unloaded from ore wagons pushed by more servitors, and the guard-beast followed the dirt track of the wagons down into darkness.

  They were still descending, but this slope was more gradual so that the haulers could push their carts up it. The wagons were not just bearing bodies, either: at least ten times as many were coming up from the depths full of dirt and chunks of raw stone, but these were being rolled away down another branch of the tunnel.

  Barrick could almost feel Vansen and Gyir trying to make sense of the arrangement, but he was already feeling queasy from the depth, the heat, and the frequent rumble of the concussive, hammering sounds farther down in the deeps. If they put me to work here, he thought, I wouldn’t last long. Barrick Eddon had fought all his life against being called frail or sickly, but living with a crippled arm had made him hate lying to himself as much as he hated it when others did it to soothe him. I could not do what these creatures are doing, working with hardly any water in this dreadful, dust-ridden place. I would die in a matter of hours.

  The guard-beast trudged downward into an ever increasing throb of activity. The inconstant thundering of what Gyir called Crooked’s Fire was much stronger now, so loud that the staggering guard-beast almost fell over several times. Hundreds of prisoners pushed carts past him up the long, wide, sloped passage, but no matter how monstrous their burden, they always moved out of the guard-beast’s way.

  At last Barrick saw the end of the passage, a huge, low arch at least twice as wide across as the Basilisk Gate back home. When the guard stepped through it into the cavern beyond, a monstrous chamber which dwarfed even the cave that housed the corpse-pit, Barrick could feel hot air rush up at his host, tugging the matted fur, bringing tears to the creature’s already blurry vision. A line of torches marked the broad track down through the swirling dust and marked off the cross-paths where other guards and prisoners labored with the weight of ore carts. To Barrick each step seemed to take a terrible effort—the powerful discharge of hot air he had felt at the doorway continued to buffet the guard-beast at every step, as though he walked down the throat of a panting dragon. It pressed at Barrick’s thoughts like crushing hands and Barrick thought he might faint away at any moment, simply swoon into insensibility like the frailest girl-child.

  Can’t you feel it? he cried to the others, his thoughts screaming. Can’t you? This is a bad place—bad! I can’t hold on anymore!

  Courage. Gyir’s thought came with the weight of all his power and knowledge, so that for a moment Barrick remembered what it was to trust him completely.

  I’ll try. Oh, gods, don’t you and Vansen feel it? Not as powerfully as you do, I think.

  Barrick hated being weak, hated it worse than anything. All through his childhood nothing could more easily prompt him to act foolishly than the suggestion, however kindly meant, that his crippled arm or his young age might give him an excuse to avoid doing something. Now, though, he had to admit he could not hold out much longer. No amount of steadying words could obliterate the cramping pain from his stomach, the queasiness that did not grow any less wretched by having been nearly constant since they had reached this place.

  Why do I feel this way? I’m not even really here! What is doing this to me? This was more than just pain and weariness—waves of fear rolled through him. He had spoken a truth to Gyir that he could feel in his bones, in his soul: this was a bad place, a wrong place.

  We don’t belong here. He might have said it so the others could hear. He didn’t know and he didn’t care. He wasn’t even ashamed anymore.

  The air grew hotter and the sounds grew louder. The gu
ardbeast was clearly familiar with it all, but still seemed to feel almost as frightened as Barrick did himself. The rising stench was not that of spoiling bodies and unwashed slaves, although there was a hint of each—Barrick could clearly recognize them even through the alien thoughts of the guard. Instead something altogether stranger billowed over him, a scent he could not identify, something that had metal in it, and fire, and the tang of ocean air, and something even of flowers, if flowers ever grew in blood.

  The edge of the pit was just before him now, glaring with the light of hundreds of torches, swimming in the haze of the burning, dust-laden air. If he could have hung back while the other two went forward, he would have—would have happily acknowledged himself a coward, a cripple, anything to avoid seeing what was in that chasm before him. But he could not leave them. He no longer knew how. He could only cling to the idea of Gyir and the idea of Vansen, cling to the creature that carried them as if it were a runaway horse and wait for it all to end. The chaos in his head was constant now and seemed to have little to do with what was actually around him—mad sounds, unrecognizable voices, moving shadows, flashes of ideas that made no sense, all hissing in his skull like angry wasps.

  The light was bright. Something sang triumphantly in his head now above all the other noise, sang without words, without a voice, but sang. He stumbled forward, or the thing that carried him stumbled forward, like a blind man into a cave full of shrieking bats. He stood at the edge and looked down.

  The great hole in the stone had been dug almost straight downward. Far below, the bottom of the pit was alive with the beetling bodies of slaves like a carcass full of maggots, hundreds of them with sweating, naked bodies and rags around their heads and faces. In the center, its peak half a hundred feet below him, sunk into the very stone of the wall and only half-uncovered by digging, was a strange shape that Barrick could not at first understand, something upright and unbelievably huge. It gleamed strangely in its exposed matrix of rock, a monstrous rectangle of black stone trimmed with dull gold and fishscale green beneath the shroud of dust and stone that clung to its exposed surface. It was astonishingly tall—almost as high as Wolfstooth Spire and far, far wider. Somebody had carved a rune deep into the black stone, a pine tree that covered most of the black rock face. Another carved shape, a crude bird with two huge eyes, had been superimposed over the tree. The far-distant shape looked immensely old, like something that had fallen down to the earth from the high stars. In the chaos of his thoughts, Barrick struggled to make sense of it, then abruptly saw it for what it was.

  A gate—a gigantic stone portal scribed with the ancient signs of the pine tree and the owl. The symbols of Kernios, god of death and the black earth.

  Dizziness at its sheer size overcame Barrick then. He let go of Gyir, let go of the guard-beast’s dull, terrified thoughts, and fell away into emptiness, unable to look at the blasphemous thing a moment longer.

  29. Bells

  At last, after battling each other for a year without stopping, Perin Skylord defeated Khors the ravisher and slew him. He cut the Moonlord’s head from his body and held it up for all to see. At this Khors’ allies fled or surrendered. In the confusion, many of those evil ones called the Twilight People hid themselves in forests and other dark places, but some fled to the chill and deadly northern wilds and raised themselves there a black fortress which they called Qul-na-Qar—home of the demons.

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

  Her dreams were becoming stranger every night, full of shadows and fire and the movements of barely seen pursuers, but all distant, as though she watched events through a thick fog or from behind a streaked and dirty window. She knew she should be frightened, and she was—but not for herself. They will catch him, was all she could think, although she did not know who he was, or who they were, for that matter. The boy she had dreamed about, the pale one with red hair in sweaty ringlets—was he the quarry of the shadowy creatures? But why should she dream repeatedly of a face she did not recognize?

  Qinnitan woke to find Pigeon half underneath her. Although the mute boy himself remained happily asleep, his bony elbows and chin and knees were poking her in so many places she might as well have been trying to get comfortable on a pile of cypress branches. Despite the aches, though, it was hard to look at his face and be angry. His innocently gaping mouth with that pitiful stub of tongue behind his teeth made her ache with a love for him unlike anything she’d felt even for her own younger brothers and sisters, perhaps because she was responsible for Pigeon in a way she hadn’t been for them.

  It was odd to lie here in this cramped, uncomfortable bed in a foreign land thinking about two people, one the child lying next to her (shivering slightly now that she had made some space for herself ), the other entirely a creature of dream. How had her life come to this? Once she had been an ordinary girl in an ordinary street, playing with the other children; now she had traveled on her own to a far country, fleeing from the autarch himself.

  Qinnitan still didn’t understand it all. Why had Sulepis, the ruler of all the southern world, chosen her in the first place? It was not as though she were a rare beauty like Arimone, his paramount wife, or even much of a beauty at all: Qinnitan had seen her own long features enough times, her thin lips pursed, her watchful, slightly suspicious eyes peering back at her from the polished mirrors of the Seclusion, to know that beyond question.

  Enough worrying, she decided, and yawned. It must be almost dawn, although she hoped the wheels of Nushash’s great cart were at least an hour from the daylight track: she wanted a little more sleep. She arranged Pigeon so that she could stretch out; he made a scraping sound of annoyance through his nose but allowed himself to be prodded into a less painful configuration.

  As she was drifting back down into the warmth of slumber she heard a dull tone so low that she could feel it rumbling in the floor. It was followed a moment later by another, pitched higher. The two notes sounded again, then a third tone joined them—bells, she finally realized, ringing in the distance. At first, in her sleepy confusion, Qinnitan thought it must be the summons to morning service in the Hive, then she remembered where she was and sat up, freeing herself from the complaining boy. Around her others were beginning to stir. The ringing went on.

  Qinnitan climbed out of bed and hurried across the dormitory room and out into the dark hallway. A few other women stumbled out with her, clumsy phantoms in their shapeless nightdresses. The bells were so loud and constant now that she could not remember what it had been like only moments before, in the silence of the night.

  She clambered up to the passage window, the one that looked east toward mighty Three Brothers temple. The sun hadn’t risen, but she could see lights in the tower windows where the bells were ringing. It was so strange—what did it mean? She looked down to see if anyone was in the streets yet, and by the light of the lantern burning at the corner of the courtyard she saw a smear of pale-haired head as a man—the man she had seen the previous night, she felt certain—moved with a certain casual hurry from below the residence window into the shadows. Her heart felt squeezed in a cold hand. Him again. Watching her, or at least watching Kossope House, the dormitory in which she lived. Who was he? What did he want?

  She stood as the first sheen of dawn turned the sky purple, cold air on her face, her skin pebbled with goosebumps. Bells were ringing all over the city. Something terrible was happening.

  The bells in Three Brothers began to peal while Pelaya was saying the Daybreak Prayer in the family chapel, ringing so loud that it seemed the walls might tumble down. She and her sisters, brother, and mother were all crowded into the chapel, and when Pelaya turned she almost knocked her brother Kiril off the bench.

  “Zoria’s mercy!” Her mother hurried to the chapel door and handed Pelaya’s infant sister to the nurse as the bells continued to crash and clang. “It is a fire! Get the children to safety.”

  “That’s not the fire bell,” Pelaya said loudly.
>
  Despite her fear, Teloni was irritated. “How do you know?”

  “Because the fire bell is only one bell, rung over and over. All the bells are ringing.”

  Her mother turned to Kiril, Pelaya’s younger brother. “Go and find your father. Find out what is happening.”

  “He’s not old enough.” Pelaya was too excited and frightened to stay with her mother and sisters. “I’ll go!”

  She was up before her mother could stop her, heading for the chapel door. “You headstrong little beast!” her mother called. “Teloni, go with your sister, keep her out of trouble. No, Kiril, you’ll stay, now—I’ll not have all my children scattered.”

  Pelaya was out the door just as Kiril’s bellow of dismay erupted, but it was still loud enough to hear even above the clangor of the bells.

  “You’re wicked!” gasped Teloni, catching up to her on the first landing. “Mama said Kiril was to go.”

  “Why? Because he’s a boy?” She pulled up her skirts so she wouldn’t trip over them as she hurried up the stairs. Already the stairwell and the landings were filling with people, some still half-dressed in their nightclothes, wandering out like sleepwalkers to see what the clamor was about.

  “Slow down!”

  “Just because you climb like a cow trying to go over a gate doesn’t mean I have to wait for you, Teli.”

  “What if it is a fire?”

  Pelaya rolled her eyes and began leaping the stairs two at a time. Didn’t anyone else take note of things but her? That was why she enjoyed talking to the foreign king, Olin Eddon: he paid attention to what was around him, and he complimented her cleverness when she did so too. “It’s not a fire, I told you. It’s probably the autarch attacking the city.”

  Teloni slid to a stop and grabbed at the wall to keep herself from falling. “It’s what?”

  “The Autarch of Xis, stupid. Don’t you ever listen to what Babba says?”