by John Shirley
Lord Kannoth laughed. “This boy has saved your life. Show some gratitude, my child. Pride is nothing, beauty is nothing, compared to the virtues of an honest heart. Believe me, this I know.”
With his lily wand, he pulled the hair back from his feral, delicate face. And wherever the flower touched, the skin changed. What had been pale and pure, in a moment was scorched and ridged, grotesque and distorted, with ragged lips pulled back in a grin. “Child,” he said softly. “What’s your name?”
“Astriana, my lord,” she mumbled into the dirt.
“Astriana, that’s a flower’s name. Accept your fate, Astriana, as I have accepted mine. This is your husband. Do you understand me?”
Tears glistened in her eyes. “Yes, my lord.”
“Speak the oath in your heart, where I can see it. Good. Then it is done.”
He stood and turned away from them. The moon slid behind a cloud. When it came free again, Lord Kannoth had disappeared.
“Come,” Haggar said, after a moment. “Let’s leave this place. It’s not safe to stay here.”
A hundred paces from the road, the forest waited. “No one will harm us,” murmured Astriana. “Are you so stupid that you did not hear? He gave his word.”
She was weeping into her fists. She crouched in the road as he stood over her, embarrassed. The air around them stood still.
“Are you so stupid that you don’t understand?” she continued. “You’re my husband now. Anything you ask, I am sworn to deliver, especially on this night.”
“That is not the custom of my tribe,” he said.
Moaning into her hands, she didn’t hear. “I am carefully punished. All these months I’ve used my own self to entice you, everything I am—I knew what I was doing. Why else would you have come?”
Then she looked up, her cheeks wet, her eyes glinting savagely. “What do you want? Don’t keep me in suspense. Whatever it is, I am bound to give it, as a good wife should.”
Standing in the bone-white roadway, Haggar cleared his throat. He fiddled with his totem stick, picking with his thumbnail at the chunks of agate. “In my clan,” he murmured humbly, “that is not the measure of a good wife.”
She gave him a glance in which a moment of clear gratitude was immediately clouded with suspicion. “Easy to say. Are you so stupid that you can’t understand what I’m offering you?”
He smiled, because he thought he understood how to disarm her. “Astriana,” he said, and saw her flinch. “Woman,” he amended, “this is what I want.” Again she cringed away, as if from a blow. “I want to understand why you have brought me here, to this place. For nine years you made the journey to my world. ‘Put him with the others,’ you said, when I was lying in the cart.”
She looked at him then, a long, slow stare. She wiped her nose on her hem and, eyes dry, clambered to her feet. “That’s what you want?”
“That’s what I want.”
“I swear you’re even stupider than I thought,” she said, but then she smiled when he burst out laughing. “In the Feywild we are bound by our promises, you understand?”
He nodded.
“Then come,” she said. “I’ll tell you. It was not nine years for me.”
She turned down the road into the forest. “What about your men?” he asked her. “Will you come back in the morning?”
“Who?” She shrugged. “They’re gone. I hired them in the village.”
“Even so. We should go back. One of them was just a child.”
She gave him a look that suggested his stupidity had grown so powerful, it had become a force of nature like the ocean or the wind.
“Besides,” he said. “We have no weapons.”
“That’s not the place to search for them.” She gestured with her hand. Looking back through the gate, he could see an enormous figure standing in the roadway near where they’d struggled over the cart. His shape was human, but his size was not.
“We have no choice,” she said. “Lord Kannoth has taken everything, all our strength. It’s a tradition. His gift to us.”
Now suddenly she was in a hurry. She turned and ran down the gentle slope, and he followed her. She had spoken the truth: there was no strength in him, no trace of his totem animal. Heavier than she, he labored to keep up, as if the air of this new world were too rich for him to breathe.
After a mile and a half, she stopped to draw breath under the forest’s eaves. “How long?” he asked, after a moment.
“Until dawn tomorrow. It happened when I made my vow. It is the way of the eladrin, to come together without any skills or powers, as simple men and women on our wedding night.”
He had the impression, now, that she was mocking him. “Don’t keep saying that.”
“It gives me no pleasure to remind you. Nine months, it was, not years. Nine months I cast my hook into that pool. You’re not the only fish I caught.”
“I suppose not.”
She studied his face as if, he thought, she were trying to memorize his ugliness. “Why aren’t you angry?” she asked. “I would be angry at the things I say.”
They stood beside a stone pillar at the entrance to the forest. It marked the border where the bleached dust of the roadway and its verges gave way to the darkness of the trees. Where the paving stones gave out and the road became a rutted track, two enormous oak trees stood as sentinels.
“Kannoth’s protection ends here,” she said. She shrugged. “Even my knife is cold.” She turned under the oaks and disappeared into the darkness.
He didn’t know whether she was lying or didn’t understand her own powers, but she retained some luminescence in the dark, a greenish glow that led him onward. Without it, he’d have had to pick his way like a blind man, because the canopy of leaves denied all but an occasional shaft of moonlight, and the path was muddy, and wound among tangled masses of roots. Soon the way steepened, and in some places they descended a cliff face among evergreens, clambering down over wet boulders. Rivulets of water fell around them, and Haggar was astonished at the fecundity of this place, the denseness and intensity of life. Every place he put his hand or foot, living creatures squirmed or flopped or skittered away, and the air was thick with bugs, which got into his nostrils and his mouth. In the darkness, sounds and smells assaulted him with an almost physical pressure, a profusion of squawking and chittering and grunting and croaking, of sap and ash and mud and rotting wood. But among all these he caught the tiny, evanescent perfume of cinnamon or clove, which he followed downward like a gleaming thread, hour after hour. Sometimes the scent of her would thicken, and he would find her waiting for him in some crevice or dell, her skin glimmering faintly.
And at these moments as they rested, she would give him partial answers to the question he’d asked: “I had to find some help,” she said. “In the deep Feydark, where we are going, there is a portal called the Living Gate. For many generations, which means many hundreds of your years, a cohort of my people were its guardians. Over the years they relaxed their vigilance because the gate was shut, sealed in the old days. Even though we retain terrifying stories of the days before the seal was put in place, still over time these legends lost their urgency, sank into myth.”
He stood beneath an overhang of gnarled roots while she bent to scoop up a handful of water. A beetle scurried up his neck and he slapped at it. When he looked down she had disappeared, and he clambered after her through the boulders. It was only after half an hour, sitting on a fallen tree trunk in a broad forest of oaks, that he heard the continuation: “So the traditions of the guardians became empty and ceremonial. It was a mark of honor at the Summer Court to be its captain. Last year a nephew of the queen achieved this post, a boy named Soveliss, and he used it to discover a way to break the seal, perhaps because he was curious about the world beyond the portal, the Far Realm. Perhaps for the glory of closing it again—we cannot question him, for he is dead, or worse than dead.”
Her voice was a drifting whisper, and he had to lean in close t
o understand. She turned her head away. “Your breath stinks,” she murmured softly.
The way grew steep again. In a crevice between enormous boulders, she paused. “At first, out of shame, he hid what he had done. He knew nothing of druidic lore, or any of our traditions. He was a boy flailing in the dark, and by the time he had confessed, most of my cohort was already destroyed. Nor was I able to recruit another, for the boy had been a favorite of the queen, and she refused to allow it. She was the one who suggested I go elsewhere, so as to find cruder folk. We are long-lived, and one of our lifespans is worth seven of yours.”
“That is well known,” grunted Haggar. “The arithmetic is clear,” he added, and Astriana smiled.
“It was my choice to train you as I did,” she said.
He remembered the long hours by himself, the years of study. “You didn’t train me.”
She shrugged. “But I provided the spark.”
Then she was gone again and he hurried after, stumbling down through smaller trees with trembling leaves and pale branches, until he reached level ground, where he sank up to his shins in water, and his bare feet disturbed minnows and frogs.
When the trees gave out entirely, he strode though waist-high bushes in the swamp. The moon was down behind the hills, and the first red glow of dawn was in the sky. From this new vantage point, and under this new light, he saw he stood in a bowl among high hills with the forest all around him. He saw for the first time that the way they had traversed, wild as it seemed, was not untouched by ancient architects and builders, for here at the bottom of the bowl, rising up out of the swamp, he could see the remains of ruined buildings, the stone foundations of colossal structures. Following Astriana’s footsteps, he soon found himself on the lip of a sinkhole which, though it was topped with mud and grass, and though rivulets of water coursed over its edge and fell in endless streams, revealed itself under the pink light as a gigantic cylinder of stone masonry, whose circumference was three miles or more, and whose bottom was obscure.
She stood on the brim of a waterfall, looking down. “We have arrived.”
In the middle of this cylindrical well, rising from the bottom, was a tower, whose gabled roofs and turrets were far below them. A stone staircase spiraled down from where they stood, a quarter of the way around the inside of the well. It ended in a fortified buttress, from which a high bridge, a single wooden span, joined a crenellated terrace at the tower’s top. Astriana had already begun to make her way down the steps, and Haggar followed; there was no rail or balustrade, and to their left yawned the abyss, an open maw of darkness with the tower as its tongue.
But after a quarter of an hour, they stood on the stone buttress at the bridge’s outer end. Guards kept watch there, archers with long bows, and halberdiers. The captain saluted as they approached the bridge. “Lady Astriana, when you didn’t return, Lord Themiranth decided to go anyway. Past midnight we brought some of them up again—another failure. Your two were the only survivors, though one has died since, I think.”
“And Themiranth?”
“He did not return.”
He was speaking to her, but he was looking at Haggar, his nostrils wide, his lips curled in disdain. “Is this orc your prisoner or your slave? I’ve got a cage full of his stinking kind.”
She smiled. “Captain, this is Archdruid Haggar, Magister of the Broken Pool, master of all druids in the mortal realm. He has agreed to help us. Is that not so, magister?”
At that moment, above them, the first rays of the morning sun touched the inside of the well, revealing tendrils of vegetation that hung down from its rim over the black stones. And as if touched by Kannoth’s flower, Haggar felt his strength return. Astriana faced him, and in the new light he noticed things he’d never seen before, either in the darkness at home when he had met her at the stone pool on the mountainside, or in Kannoth’s bewitching moonlight, which had covered everything it touched with a light as thick as paint, hiding as much as it revealed. She stood just his height, a fair-haired woman in ragged blue-green silk, barefoot, with muddy legs. Like all the eladrin, she appeared to have no pupils or whites to her eyes, which had a faintly yellow cast. Her wide mouth and forehead, her high cheekbones were beautiful to him—beyond beautiful—but at the same time he could see her flaws, the misshapen bridge of her nose, where it had been broken and reset, and the scar that ran over her cheekbone and her lips.
Suddenly embarrassed, he looked down at himself, the torn wedding shirt, which revealed his tattooed chest and shoulders, slick with sweat. “ ‘Magister’—that’s a new one,” chucked the captain. “Is this creature capable of speech?”
“It is you who should be silent,” Astriana said. She turned, and Haggar followed her over the bridge into the tower. And she whispered to him as she walked through the guard chambers and tapestried corridors, so that he had to follow close behind her. “Among my people, it is customary for a man and wife to trade requests. You asked a question, and I answered. Now it is my turn. I want you to close this gate with me, and kill whatever creatures have crawled through from the Far Realm. Then it will be time for you to ask again.”
“Anything I want?”
“Anything you want,” she conceded, eyes fixed straight ahead. A pair of soldiers saluted, then drew back in surprise when they saw Haggar. “One more thing,” she continued without turning around. “You are not to speak of Lord Kannoth, or refer in any way to the magic he cast over us, or of the promise I made. These obligations can only be dissolved by the Summer Queen at the Court of Stars, whom I will petition as soon as we have done our work. That will be enough of an opportunity for my humiliation, as if I needed to dissolve a marriage with a pig or a goat. No, be quiet,” she went on, as he tried to interrupt her. “Among my people, my ugliness is already a legend. The part of a seductress was a new one to me, not one I could accomplish here. Doubtless I enjoyed it. Doubtless that was part of Kannoth’s joke.”
They had come to the center of the tower, a circular chamber that also contained a well, the interior echo of the colossal architecture outside. And in the middle of the well was an iron cage suspended from a hook and pulley and reached by an iron ramp. Without pausing, Astriana climbed the ramp and stepped into the cage, where she stood holding the bars. Haggar entered behind her, and at a nod from her, a pair of soldiers pulled the ramp away, leaving the cage dangling. Then another pair let down the chain; the cage descended down the length of the shaft, whose bottom was in darkness, invisible to Haggar as he peered between his filthy feet.
They passed storey after storey of iron balustrades, lit by glimmering lanterns. In time, Haggar guessed, they had penetrated below the foundations of the tower, and down into the rock. The air became damp and thick. As they descended, he felt his mood darken also. Astriana said nothing during all this time, but only stood with her hands on the iron bars, embarrassed, he imagined, at having revealed so much. Now that they could talk freely without fear of being overheard, she was silent. Nor could he think of what to say. “This is my duty as your husband,” he ventured finally, “to close this gate?”
She shot him a look of agonized contempt. “If Themiranth is dead, it is a blessing. Not once has he followed my command.”
A bell clanged and the cage jerked to a halt, dangling and groaning at the end of its stupendous chain. They hung suspended in a natural cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites the length of a man. Down below, a platoon of soldiers labored to secure them with long grappling hooks, and then to pull them to the edge of a metal structure, a wheeled staircase; when the cage grated against its iron edge, Astriana leaped onto it as if relieved not to be with him any longer in such an enclosed space, and sprang down the stairway, among soldiers very different from the eladrin in the upper tower. These were men in black armor, with hunched shoulders and heavy faces, stunted legs, and powerful arms.
They were inhabitants of the Feydark, Haggar guessed, firbolgs and goblins. One looked up, and he saw it was missing an eye. They clustered
around Astriana as she descended the stairs, and she held out her hands, whether to welcome them or keep them at a distance, Haggar couldn’t tell. They moved aside to let her pass, and she waited for him to catch up. “If the watch captain is right,” she said, “we don’t have time to lose. You will see.”
Then she turned to speak to the one-eyed soldier in a language Haggar didn’t know. “He says he’s laid them in the antechamber,” she summarized after a minute’s talk. “Come.”
They passed into a torchlit corridor, rough-hewn from the rock. And then through an iron door into a vaulted hall, at the far end of which two figures lay in nests of rags. Astriana hurried to them and went down on her knees.
One was alive and one was dead, as the captain of the watch had claimed. Astriana knelt over the living one, clasping one of her hands and pushing the hair back from her face. A smoking lantern hung from an iron stanchion above their heads, and by its light Haggar examined the corpse of the other, a tiefling, he saw, with bosses of bone along the crest of his scalp, and curling horns that rose up from his brow, one intact, the other lopped off at the base. The creature was dressed in jointed armor, and in his stiffened hand he still clutched a druid’s staff, decorated with carved runes and also sheared off short. He lay on his back, and the straw and rags beneath him were soaked in his black blood.
Fascinated, Haggar studied the man’s face, his curled, heavy beard, his red skin, paler now, he imagined, in death. He knew the history of this maligned and hated race, how ancient human families had sworn pacts with devils and corrupted their entire lines. “What did you promise him?” he asked.
Astriana didn’t answer. The other woman was a shifter from the look of her, with a flat, feline face and jagged teeth. Hair grew on her cheeks and down her neck, and she was dressed in fur and leather. Or rather she had been, for she had ripped most of her clothing away with her long claws, and lay with her hairy body exposed. Her totem stick had fallen away from her and lay forgotten on the ground, a black shaft of tibia bone studded with uncut tiger’s eyes.