Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  She shook her head, her smile so sadly sweet it was like a knife in his chest. “You do not have to explain, dear Matthias. It was selfish of me. I had only hoped...”

  “You will never know the depth of my feelings, Elan. Please. Let’s not speak of it anymore. It is too hard.” He squinted, wiped fiercely at his eyes. “Just...let me hold your head. Here, lie against me.” As she nestled against him, her back against his belly, her head against his shoulder, he could feel every place she touched him, through both her clothes and his, like a hot nail through a blacksmith’s glove. “Lean back,” he whispered, feeling as though he were a monster worse even than Hendon Tolly. “Lean back. Close your eyes and open your mouth.”

  She shut her eyes. He marveled at her long lashes, which cast shadows on her cheeks in the candlelight. “Oh, but first I must pray!” she said in a small voice. “It is never too late for that, surely? Zoria will hear me, even if she decides to spurn my request. I must try.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Her lips moved silently for a while. Tinwright stared. “I am done,” she said quietly, her eyes still tight shut.

  He leaned forward then, letting her breath swirl gently against his face, then kissed her. She flinched, expecting something else, then her lips softened and for a moment that seemed like an hour he let himself vanish into the astonishing truth of what he had dreamed so often. At last he pulled back, but not before one of his tears splashed on her cheek. So sweet, so trusting, so sad!

  “Oh, Elan,” he whispered, “forgive me for this—for all of this.”

  She did not speak again, but lay with her mouth open like a child who waited, fearful but bravely patient, for some terrifying physic. He used his sleeve to pull the stopper from the flask, then used the needle ever so carefully to lift a single drop and let it fall into her mouth.

  Elan M’Cory gave a little gasp of surprise, then swallowed. “It does not taste like so much,” she said. “Bitter, but not painfully so.”

  Tinwright could not speak.

  “I could have loved you well,” she said, and a smile played around her lips. “Ah, what a strange sensation! I cannot feel my tongue. I think...”

  She fell silent. Her breath slowed until he could not perceive it any longer.

  One moment Ferras Vansen was there and the next moment the guard captain was gone, tumbled into nothingness without even crying out, torn away so quickly that, like a man whose leg had been blasted off by a cannonball, Barrick Eddon had only perceived the shock but not the loss itself.

  The demigod Jikuyin was bellowing with both his voice and his thoughts, making the air of the cavern shudder and Barrick’s bones throb inside his flesh. “OH! OH, THEY ARE FREE, THE CURSED LITTLE TRICKSTERS!” The giant swung his shaggy head toward Barrick, who crouched panting at the base of the massive doorway, dropped by his guards as they fought Vansen. The demigod’s great eye narrowed and he turned to his lieutenant, the gray man; even the Dreamless seemed to have been caught by surprise. “Ueni’ssoh!” Although he spoke less harshly, the demigod’s words still rattled Barrick’s skull. “Carry on, you bloodless fool!” For the first time, Barrick could hear the actual words Jikuyin spoke, a rumbling, spiky tongue that bore no relation to what he heard in his head. “The gate is still open! Finish the invocation!”

  Ueni’ssoh glided toward him and Barrick stumbled to his feet, but three more guards had fallen in behind the Dreamless, two of them armed with jagged-bladed axes, and he knew it was only a matter of moments until they would have him bleeding like a hung pig all over the threshold of the god’s gate. But his shackles were gone, he realized in wonder: somehow Vansen had struck them off before the darkness took him.

  Down! The warning in his head seemed so close, so powerful, that for an instant he thought it must be the voice of the demigod himself pounding in his skull. Get down! Now!

  Barrick looked around in confusion. Gyir was free of his shackles, too. The fairy-warrior stood on the top of a small rise of stone with half a dozen dead guards sprawled at his feet and something burning brightly in his hand—a flaming skull...?

  If you want to live another moment, boy, the fairy’s voice trumpeted through his thoughts, THEN LIE DOWN!

  Barrick threw himself toward the ground even as Gyir’s arm swept forward and what seemed a tiny comet hurtled across the cavern. For a moment everything seemed to stop—the faces of guards and prisoners lifted and turned like sunflowers as they followed the path of the blazing thing —then a blast of heat and light crashed across the cavern and rolled Barrick violently before dropping him again. He lay in a vibrating silence, unable to get up, as if lightning had struck only a short distance away.

  The rush of ideas into his head was so violent that at first Barrick could make no sense of the demigod’s angry burst of words and thoughts—he felt only a huge hammer of noise pounding at his ears and mind until he felt sure his head would collapse like an eggshell.

  “...HOW DID THAT MONGREL CREATURE, THAT FACELESS SLUG, GET HIS HANDS ON MY PRECIOUS FIREPOWDER...?”

  Stunned and limp, Barrick thought it might be easiest simply to lie here on his back and let the world end, but a small, nagging voice in the back of his mind kept suggesting that perhaps a prince should meet his death sitting up. He rolled over, trying to get his legs under him.

  Another thunderous crack, farther away this time and followed not by ringing silence but by hoarse screams, proved that at least there was still sound and direction and distance. Barrick sat up and brushed something wet off his arm—a rag of bloody skin, but not his own. The rest of the shaggy guard and his two companions, victims of the first of the flaming things Gyir had thrown, were scattered across several yards of cavern floor. Even in such chaos, Barrick was glad the lights were dim: it was madly strange to see things that were so small and yet obviously part of a person who had been alive only moments before.

  Gyir, who had been surrounded by guards and prisoners, now stood alone in a widening circle as creatures scrambled away from him in all directions. The fairy held a dirt-smeared death’s head in each hand, and Barrick wondered what strange magic the faceless warrior had summoned.

  Get up and run, Barrick Eddon. Gyir’s words echoed in his head and he clambered to his feet almost without realizing.

  I will keep them back as long as my fireballs last.

  Barrick could not frame the words, but Gyir must have sensed his confusion.

  Exploding devices. I had those I could command pack skulls with gun-flour, seal them with mud, and leave them here for me. This way Jikuyin’s victims will get at least a little revenge! Gyir’s thoughts billowed like windblown flame —he was laughing! For the first time Barrick could feel that the fairy had truly been raised in battle, that it was his element in a way it would never be Barrick’s. Now go, while I hold them at bay! Strike for the surface!

  But Vansen...!

  Is gone, likely dead. All that is certain is that he is lost to us now. You must go. Do you yet have the thing I gave you?

  Barrick had forgotten the mirror. His hand crept to his shirt.

  Yes.

  Think of it no more. Flee! I will do what I can here. But you have to come with me...!

  It is more important that at least one of us escapes, Barrick Eddon. Take it to the king in the House of the People. Now go. But...!

  “ENOUGH!” The demigod Jikuyin rose up above a screeching herd of prisoners with flames running in their fur or their ragged clothes. The ogre seemed to grow like a ship’s bellying sail until his head threatened to bump the roof of the cavern. “YOU HAVE WASTED ENOUGH OF MY TIME, STORM LANTERN. THE DOOR TO THE EARTHLORD’S HOME IS OPEN. NO LAW, NOT EVEN THE BOOK OF THE FIRE OF THE VOID ITSELF, SAYS I CANNOT SEAL THE CHARM BY SQUEEZING THE BLOOD OUT OF THIS MORTAL CHILD LIKE WATER FROM A BAG OF WHEY!” Jikuyin took a stride toward Barrick, but Gyir bent and lit another muddied skull from the torch by his feet, then straightened and flung the fizzing, sparking ball toward the towering shape. It spat a gr
eat gout of fire and hot air as it flared at the giant’s feet and knocked him staggering, but it flung Barrick back onto his knees as well.

  Run, said Gyir in a small, insistent voice, and then he lit two more skulls and flung them at Jikuyin. Before they had even struck, the fairy was running toward the roaring demigod with a spear he must have taken from one of the guards. Then the giant and Gyir both disappeared in the doublecrash of light and sound: Barrick could feel the skin on his cheeks blistering in the heat.

  Barrick got up again, dizzy, with head throbbing and eyes blurred by stinging tears. He was almost blind, anyway—the cavern was full of billowing dust. He stumbled toward what he hoped was the way out, stepping over bodies that squirmed slowly, like dying insects. One of the hairy guards, its face nearly burned away, clutched weakly at his shin with charred fingers. Barrick crushed the creature’s skull with his booted foot, then pulled an ax out of its clawed grip, a weapon he could wield with his one good hand. He half climbed, half stumbled up the slope toward the doorway leading out of the great cavern. All the other prisoners and guards who could do so seemed to have fled through it already: nothing blocked his way but corpses and whimpering near-corpses.

  When he reached the opening, Barrick turned back to see the demigod Jikuyin outlined by the flames in which he stood, grinning and roaring so that his cracked face seemed about to split open, with Gyir clutched in his great hand. The fairy, who should have been crushed by that awesome grip, instead stabbed and stabbed at the giant’s chest with his spear, each thrust followed by a spurt of black blood, each spurt only seeming to make Jikuyin laugh louder.

  “YOU CANNOT HURT ME!” the giant shouted. “THE ICHOR OF SVEROS HIMSELF RUNS IN MY VEINS! I COULD DROWN YOUR ENTIRE RACE IN MY BLOOD AND STILL SURVIVE!”

  Gyir jabbed silently, not just at Jikuyin’s chest and face, but at his massive hand, too, struggling to keep the giant from throttling out his life.

  “I WILL FIND YOUR LITTLE SUNLANDER BOY LIKE A CAT FINDS A LIMPING MOUSE,” Jikuyin chortled. “THEN I WILL RIDE HIS BLOOD TO THE VERY SEAT OF THE GODS!”

  Barrick knew he should run—should take advantage of Gyir’s sacrifice, however hopeless—but now something new distracted him. The light of a torch had bloomed in the cavern’s entrance. Several Drows, the twisted creatures that looked like Funderlings, had pushed a huge corpsewagon into the cavern doorway. This one was not loaded with the bodies of dead prisoners but with barrels, and the barrels were surrounded by dry straw.

  A bearded Drow sat atop the barrels. He seemed oblivious to the bizarre, apocalyptic events in the cavern below him, his eyes fixed instead on something in the middle of the air. He might have been an old man beside a busy road, content to wait until his passage would be perfectly safe.

  “AND WHEN I HAVE THE EARTHLORD’S POWER,”

  Jikuyin was gloating, oblivious to the thick, shining blood that oozed down his front, heedless of the dozen new wounds on his face and neck, “I WILL PAINT YOUR PEOPLE’S EPITAPH WITH THE JUICES I WRING FROM YOUR CORPSES! AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT EPITAPH WILL BE?”

  I know what yours will be. Gyir’s thought was so quiet that Barrick could barely understand it, although he stood only a few dozen yards away. It will be, “He was not good at thinking ahead.”

  The fairy’s arm shot out. His spear jabbed so hard it pushed all the way through the demigod’s neck and out the nape. Jikuyin bellowed in anger, but did not seem any more crippled by this blow than by the others. Gyir leaped onto the giant’s neck and used the shaft of the protruding spear as an anchor so he could wrap his arms and legs tightly around Jikuyin’s head. The ogre’s cries of rage now as loud as the earlier explosions, he staggered out into the middle of the track that ran down from the doorway to the cleared space in front of the earth god’s black gateway.

  The driver atop the wagon full of barrels raised the torch and waved it. The little men massed behind him shoved the cart out onto the downslope.

  As the cart picked up speed, bouncing down the track faster than a horse could run, the driver made no attempt to dismount. Instead he dropped the torch into the straw piled around his feet. The flames flared high around the barrels, so that within a few more moments a great billowing blaze surrounded the little man and filled the back of the wagon. At the base of the track the unheeding giant still tore blindly at the small shape on his back, the faceless gnat who so annoyingly refused to die.

  Jikuyin finally yanked Gyir free, pulling the fairy’s arm loose in its socket so that it dangled helplessly and the spear dropped from his nerveless fingers. As Jikuyin bellowed in triumph, ignoring the wagon, Barrick realized what was in the barrels.

  “I WILL EAT YOU, INSECT!” the demigod roared.

  You will choke on me. The skin of Gyir’s outer face had been torn away, and his strange small mouth twisted in what might have been a bloody smile. Look.

  For the merest instant Barrick saw Jikuyin’s face and the way it changed, then the blazing cart crashed into the demigod and the entire cavern vanished in a howling, crackling storm of fire. Barrick felt the Storm Lantern’s last thought, a joyous curse on his defeated enemy, then the prince was flung away up the slope, skidding and rolling, and he felt the fairy’s presence in his thoughts wink out like a snuffed candle.

  Barrick came to a stop in the doorway amid the shrieking Drows who had brought the wagon, awakened by Gyir’s death into this incomprehensible chaos. The stupefying concussion of the gun-flour, still echoing, was followed a moment later by the cracking, scraping sound of the cavern’s stone roof collapsing. Solid rock jumped and boomed like Heaven’s own drums. Several of the creatures who had unwittingly engineered this monstrous event scrambled over Barrick like rats in their haste to flee the doomed cavern. The prince could only cover his head and hold his breath as the impacts lifted and dropped him.

  A millionweight of stone came tumbling down, burying demigod and mortals alike, sealing the open gateway to the gods’ realm for the next thousand years and more.

  38. Beneath the Burning Eye

  Even the gods weep when they speak of the Theomachy, the war between the clan of the three heavenly brothers and the dark clan of Zmeos the Horned One. Many of the brightest fell, and their like will never be seen again, but their deeds live on, that men may understand honor and proper love of the gods.

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

  Pelaya had never seen anything like it. Even in her worst childhood nightmares, chased by some hungry monster like Brabinayos Boots-of-Stone out of her nurse’s stories, she had not felt a terror and hopelessness like this.

  The sky above Hierosol was black as if with a terrible storm, but it was smoke, not clouds, that had hidden the sun for three days now. On either side of the citadel much of the Crab Bay and Fountain districts were in flame. Pelaya could see the flames in particularly bright relief from the window of the family house near Landsman’s Market, a horrible and fascinating sight, as if beautiful, glowing flowers were sprouting all across the city. In the districts along the seawalls the sickly smoke of the sulfur rafts had crept over the houses in a poisonous yellow fog. She had heard her father telling one of the servants that the autarch’s burning sulfur had emptied most of the Nektarian Harbor district, that even the seaport end of the Lantern Broad was as silent as a tomb but for hurrying files of soldiers moving from one endangered part of the wall to another. Surely this must be the end of the world—the sort of thing the ragged would-be prophets in the smaller church squares were always shrieking about. Who could have guessed that those dirty, smelly men would be right after all?

  “Come away from there, Pelaya!” her sister Teloni cried. “You will let in the poison smoke and kill us all!”

  Startled, she let the window shutter go, almost losing her fingers as it crashed down. She turned in fury but the angry reply never came out of her mouth. Teloni looked helpless and terrified, her face was as white as one of the family’s ancestor masks.

  “The
smoke is far away, down by the sea walls,” Pelaya told her, “and the wind is pushing the other direction. We are in no danger from the poison.”

  “Then why are you looking? Why do you want to see...that?” Her sister pointed at the shutter as though what lay beyond were nothing but some unfortunate person—a deformed tramp, perhaps, or some other grotesque who could be ignored until he gave up and went away again.

  “Because we are at war!” Pelaya could not understand her sister or her mother. They both skulked about the house as though this astonishing, dreadful thing was not happening. At least little Kiril was waving his wooden sword, pretending to slaughter Xixian soldiers. “Do you not care?”

  “Of course we care.” Teloni’s eyes filled with tears. “But there is nothing we can do about it. What good does it do to...to stare at it?”

  Pelaya got her shoulder against the shutter and lifted it again, pushing so hard that she almost fell out as it began to open. Teloni gasped and Pelaya felt her own heart speed—the cobbled courtyard was three floors below, quite far enough to break her bones.

  Her sister grabbed Pelaya’s arm. “Be careful!” “I’m fine, Teli. Look, come here, I’ll show you what Babba’s doing.”

  “You don’t know. You’re just a girl—you’re younger than me!”

  “Yes, but I pay attention when he talks.” She got the shutter all the way open and propped it with the thick wooden rod so she’d have her hand free to point. “There, by the Gate of the Fountain, do you see? That’s the place where the autarch’s cannons are trying to knock down the wall, but Babba is too clever. As soon as he realized what they were doing, he sent men to build a new wall behind it.”

  “A new wall? But they’ll just knock that down too, won’t they?”

  “Perhaps. But by the time they do, he’ll have built another... and another...and so on. He will not let them break through.”

  “Truly?” Teloni looked a little relieved. “But won’t they dig under the wall? I heard Kiril say the autarch’s men would dig tunnels under the walls here by Memnos or Salamander where there’s no ocean—that they could come up in our garden if they wanted to!”