by Tad Williams
It was not to be, of course. She could hide here in Hierosol with people who spoke her language, or she could go back to Xis and die. What other choices were there?
Pigeon was tugging at her arm; she was suddenly reminded that her own life was not her only responsibility.
Freedom. Sometimes it seemed that the more of it she had, the more she lacked.
Nikos had pretended to bump against her for the fifth or sixth time, and this time had actually managed to put his hand on her rump and give it a squeeze before she could slap it away, when she decided to turn back to the captain’s house. Her privacy stolen, her thoughts dragged down by Nikos’ innocently stupid questions and less innocent attempts to paw her, she knew the best of the day was over. Qinnitan sighed. Time to go back to Tedora and that laugh of hers like the cry of an irritated goat, to the thick smoke in the air and the endless noise and the jumble of screeching children. She couldn’t blame Nikos for wanting to spend time out of doors, she just wished he would spend it somewhere other than in her vicinity.
She put her arm around Pigeon, who pressed against her happily—he, at least, seemed quite content with their new life, and played with the younger children as comfortably as if they were his own brothers and sisters—then pulled her hood a little closer around her face, as she always did when she walked through the neighborhood around the captain’s house, where nearly half the people seemed to come from Xis and many of them were sailors who shipped back and forth across the Osteian Sea several times a year. The house seemed oddly quiet as they walked down the long path: she could hear one of the younger children talking cheerful nonsense, but not much else.
The captain’s wife Tedora looked up from her stool by the table. She had started her day of drinking wine early that morning—part of the reason Qinnitan had left the house—and judging by the jug and cup set beside her, not to mention the blurry, sly look on her seamed face, she had not slackened her pace in Qinnitan’s absence.
She must have been pretty once, Qinnitan often thought. Pretty enough to catch a captain, no small trick in Onir Soteros. The bones were still good, but Tedora’s skin was as cracked as old leather, her fingers knobby with age and hard work—not that Qinnitan had seen her do much of that.
“He’s waiting for you.” Tedora gestured to the bedroom, a sour smile flitting across her face. “Dorza. He wants to see you.”
“What?” For a moment Qinnitan could make no sense of it. Was Tedora sending her in to become the master’s concubine? Then she realized that, of course, in a house so small, the single bedroom would be the only place to carry on a private conversation—she had seen Dorza take some of his crewmen back to talk about matters of the ship and of their involuntary exile from Xis.
A chilly heaviness lodged in her gut. A private conversation, was it? She felt certain she knew what he wanted, and had been fearing it for days. Axamis Dorza, saddled with the feeding of two people who should have not been his responsibility, was going to try to marry her off to young Nikos, to bind her properly to his household so that she could be set to work. Qinnitan had no doubt it was Tedora’s idea. If, as she suspected, Dorza had another family back in Xis, he would be more than willing to do it, just to keep the peace here in his Hierosoline harbor. The thought made her heart as cold as her stomach.
“You asked to speak to me?” she said as the flimsy door fell shut behind her. It was dark in the room, only a single small oil lamp burning atop the large sea chest Dorza used as his captain’s table. The shape there stirred, but so slowly and strangely that for a moment Qinnitan had to fight back an urge to scream, as though she had found herself locked in with a savage animal.
The captain looked up. His face, normally as clean-lined as a ship, seemed to have lost its bones, chin sunk against his chest, eyes almost invisible under his brows. “I have been…talking,” Dorza said slowly. “With men newly come from Xis.” She could smell the wine on his breath from halfway across the small room. “Why did you not tell me who you were?”
A different kind of chill descended on her now. “I have never lied to you,” she said, although that was another lie. She wondered if sacred bees were dying in the Temple of the Hive, as a few were said to do whenever one of the acolytes abused the truth or thought an impure thought. If that’s so, I must have killed at least half of the poor bees by now. What a sinner I have become in this last year, in the simple matter of saving my own life!
“You did not tell me all. I knew you were…” He lowered his voice. “I knew you were Jeddin’s woman. But I did not understand…”
“I was never Jeddin’s woman,” she said, anger overcoming even her fear at Axamis Dorza’s strange, grim mood. “He thrust himself upon me, put my life in danger. He did not lay with me, nor has any man!”
“Well, no matter that,” said Dorza. He seemed a little surprised by her claim. “The knot at the center of the thing is this—you are fled from the autarch’s own Seclusion.”
She took a breath. “It is true. It was that or be handed over to Mokori the strangler, although I had done nothing wrong.”
Dorza lurched to his feet, swaying. “But you have murdered me!” he roared.
“I’ve done nothing of the sort, Captain Dorza. You have done nothing wrong, and can say so. You gave a young woman passage on your master’s order, without knowing your master had fallen out of favor—and certainly without knowing anything of the woman herself…”
He staggered a few steps toward her, looming over her like a tree that might topple. “Nothing wrong! By the fiery balls of Nushash, do you think the autarch will care? Do you think he will call off his torturers and say, ‘You know, this fellow isn’t so bad. Let him go back to his life again.’ You liar. You heartless bitch! You slut…!” The captain’s hand shot out and clutched her arm so hard she could not escape, although he could barely stand straight.
“I have done nothing wrong!” she shouted. “Nushash himself is my witness—I was taken as a virgin from the Temple of the Hive and Jeddin came to me in the Seclusion and told me he was in love with me. Is it my fault he was mad, the poor dead fool?”
Dorza’s free hand rose up, trembling, to strike her, but then it fell again. He let go of her arm and stumbled back to his chair. “Then that son of a bitch Jeddin has destroyed me as surely as if he had shot me with a musket ball.” He turned a red eye on Qinnitan again. “Go. Get out of this house and take that idiot child with you. I do not care where you go—I never want to hear your name again. When the autarch’s men come to cut my head off and drag my wife and children into slavery, I will be certain to tell them what you said…that it was not your fault.” He made a horrible barking sound, half laugh, half sob.
“You are casting me out? With nothing? Out of fear that some of the autarch’s spies might find out…”
“The autarch’s spies? Are you whores of the Seclusion really so ignorant? We always thought you knew more of events than we outside the palace ever could.” He spat on the floor—shocking from such a tidy man. “It is only a matter of a few moons or so before the autarch’s fleet sails. He is outfitting new warships and arming soldiers even now.” Dorza took a key from his belt, then bent and clumsily unlocked the chest chained to the table leg. He took a few pieces of silver out and dropped them to the floor. One coin rolled right to Qinnitan’s feet, but she did not stoop for it. “Take those. At least you may then get far enough from me before you’re caught that I will gain a few more weeks of life.”
“What do you mean, the autarch’s fleet? Sails where?”
“Here, you foolish, foolish girl. He is coming here, to conquer Hierosol, then the rest of Eion after it. Now get out of my house.”
6
Skurn
Here is truth! The light was Tso, and Zha was the wife he created out of the nothingness. She fled him but he followed. She hid, but he discovered.
She protested, but he persuaded. At last she surrendered, and at their lovemaking the heavens roared with the first winds.
—from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One
GUARD CAPTAIN FERRAS VANSEN woke to the sickly glow of the shadowlands, unchanged since he had fallen asleep. His cloak was no longer covering his face and rain spattered him. He groaned and rolled over, scrabbling for the hem of the heavy woolen garment, but it was trapped between him and the dampening ground and he had to sit up, groaning even louder, to free it.
He was just about to roll back into sleep when he saw a hint of movement at the corner of his gaze. He held his breath and turned his head as slowly as he could, but saw nothing except the long, wet grass and the familiar lump of Barrick’s sleeping form. Beyond lay the terrifying creature called Gyir, but the warrior-fairy also seemed to be asleep.
Vansen let out what he hoped sounded like the honest snort of someone whose slumber had been briefly but inconsequentially disturbed, then lay silently, praying that his heart was not really beating as loudly as it seemed to be. He knew he had seen something more than the simple bouncing of rain-bent grass.
Movement resumed beside the soggy remnants of last night’s fire, a rounded shape bobbing along slowly only a few paces from the sleeping prince.
Vansen flung his cloak at it and dived after; the thing let out a muffled squawk and tried to escape, but it seemed to be tangled. Vansen scrambled across the wet ground on elbows and knees and managed to catch it before it disappeared into the darkness again. As he held it wrapped in the damp wool, he found it smaller than he had feared and surprisingly light, loose as a bundle of sticks and cloth in his hands: even with a poor grip on it, his strength seemed more than equal to the task of holding it. The captive creature let out a terrified, whistling shriek that sounded almost like a child’s cry. He could feel by its struggles that it was a large bird of some kind, with wings that must stretch nearly as wide as a man’s arms.
As he tried to protect his face from the darting beak something else rushed toward him, startling him so that he did not even fight when the bird was ripped out of his hands. By the time Vansen could turn his head, the shadow-man Gyir had a squat knife with scalloped edges pressed lengthwise against the creature’s throat as the bird thrashed and made odd, almost human noises of fear. It was a raven, Ferras Vansen could see now, mostly black, with a few patches of white random as spatters of paint, but Vansen paid it little attention. He was terrified and astonished at the sudden appearance of Gyir’s knife, and shamed by his own incompetence.
Great Perin, has he had that all along? He could have murdered us at any time! How did I miss it?
But he could not ignore the bird after all, because it had begun to talk.
“Don’t kill us, Masters!” The voice rasped and whistled, but the words were clear. “Us’ll never do wrong at you again! Us were only so hungry!”
“You can speak,” said Vansen, reduced to the obvious.
The raven turned one bright yellow eye toward him, beak opening and shutting as it tried to get its breath. “Aye. And most sweetly, too, given chance, Masters!”
Prince Barrick sat up, tousle-haired and puffy-eyed, looking at least for this moment more like an ordinary sleepy young man and less like the maddening enigma he had been. “Why precisely are you two pummeling a bird?” He squinted. “It’s rather spotty. Might it be good to eat?”
“No, Master!” the raven said, struggling uselessly. Patches of gray skin showed where it had lost feathers, making it seem even more pathetic. “Foul and tasteless, I am! Pizen!”
Gyir changed position to steady the squirming bird, poised to kill it.
“No!” Vansen said. “Let it be.”
“But why?” asked the prince. “Gyir says it’s old and going to die soon, anyway. And it was thieving from us.”
“It speaks our tongue!”
“So do many other thieves.” The prince seemed more amused than anything else.
“Aye,” the bird panted, “speech it good and well, thy sunlander tongue. Learned it by Northmarch when I lived close by your folk there.”
“Northmarch?” It was a name Vansen had barely heard in years, a haunted name. “How could that be? Men have not lived at Northmarch for two centuries, since the shadows rolled over it.”
“Oh, aye, us were young then.” The raven still struggled helplessly in Gyir’s grasp. “Us had shiny pins and joints all supple, and us’s knucklers were firm.”
Vansen turned to Gyir, forgetting for a moment that it was harder to communicate with him than with the raven. “Two centuries old? Is that possible?”
The fairy came the closest to a human gesture Vansen had yet seen, a kind of slithery shrug. The meaning was clear: it was possible, but why should it matter?
“Yes, it matters.” Vansen knew he was replying to words not spoken and perhaps not even intended, but at this moment he did not care: in the land of the mad, a land of talking animals and faceless fairies, madness was the only sane creed. “He talks like my mother’s father, although that means nothing to you. I have not heard speech like that since I was a child.” Vansen realized that he ached for conversation—ordinary talk, not the elliptical mysteries of spellbound Prince Barrick, each answer bringing only more questions. In fact, he realized, he was so lonely that he would accept comradeship even from a bird.
But it wouldn’t do to make that clear just yet—even a bird could be suspect in these treacherous, magical lands. “So why shouldn’t we kill you?” Vansen asked the struggling raven. “What were you doing in our camp, poking around? Tell, or I will let him slit your throat.”
“Nay!” It was half shriek, half croak, a despairing sound that made Vansen almost feel ashamed of himself. “Mean no harm, us! Just hungry!”
“Gyir says he smells of those creatures,” Barrick offered, “—the ones who attacked him and killed his horse. ‘Followers,’ they’re called.”
“Not us, Masters!” The raven struggled, but despite its size, it was helpless as a sparrow in the fairy-warrior’s hands. “Was just following the Followers, like. Can’t fly much now, us—pins be all a-draggled.” It carefully eased one of its wings free, and this time Gyir allowed it. More than a few shiny black feathers were certainly missing. “Went to eat summat a few seasons gone by, but that summat be’nt quite dead yet,” the raven explained, bobbing its head. “Tore us upwise and downwise.”
“And the smell of those…Followers?”
“Us can’t stay high or fly long like us did oncet. Have to follow close, go from branch to branch, like. Followers have a powerful stink.” It ruffled its parti-colored feathers with its beak. “Can’t smell it, usself. Poor Skurn is old now—so old!”
“Skurn? Is that what you’re called?”
“Aye, or was. Us were handsome then, when that were our name.” He poked his beak toward Gyir. “His folk drove all the sunlanders out from Northmarch. Life were good then, for a little while, in the fighting—dead ’uns every which side! But then sunlanders were gone and poor Skurn was leaved behind to shift as us could when twilight come down.” The beak opened to let out a mournful sigh, but the shiny eyes looked to Vansen with calculating hope, like a child searching for the first light of forgiveness.
He had no stomach to kill the thing. “Let the bird go,” he said. Nothing happened. Gyir was not looking at him but at Barrick. “Please, Highness. Let it go.”
Barrick frowned, then sighed. “I suppose.” He waved his hand at Gyir, still showing a remnant of the royal manner even here beneath the dripping trees. “Let it go free.”
As soon as the blade was withdrawn the bird rolled to its feet and took a few hopping steps, quite nimble for all its professed age. It flapped its wings as though surprised and pleased to find it still had them. “Oh, thank you, Masters, thank you! Skurn will serve you, do everything you ask us, find all best hiding places, rotting dead ’uns, birds’ nests, even where the fish go scumbling down in the muddy bottom! And eat so little, us? Never will you know us is even here.”
“What is he talking about?” Vansen said crossly. He
had expected it to bolt for the undergrowth or fly away, but the bird had distracted him and he had forgotten to watch where Gyir hid the knife; now the Twilight man’s hand was empty again.
“You saved him, Captain.” Amusement rippled coldly across Barrick’s face. Suddenly he seemed a boy no longer, but more like an old man—ageless. “The raven’s yours. It seems you’ll finally taste the pleasures of being lord and master.”
“Lord and master,” said the raven, beginning to clean the mud from his matted feathers with his long black beak. He bobbed his head eagerly. “Yes, you folk are Masters of Skurn, now. Us will do you only good.”
The forest track they followed seemed to have once been a road: only flimsy saplings and undergrowth grew on it, while the larger trees—most with sharp, silvery-black leaves that made Vansen think of them as “dagger trees”—formed a bower overhead, so that the horses paced almost as easily as they might have on the Settland Road or some other thoroughfare in mortal lands. If the going was easier, though, it was not a peaceful ride; Vansen had begun to wonder whether saving the wheezing raven might not have been his second-worst decision of recent days, exceeded only by the choice to follow Barrick across the Shadowline. Reprieved from death, Skurn could not stop talking, and although occasionally he said something interesting or even useful, Vansen was beginning to feel things would have been better if he had let Gyir the Storm Lantern spit the creature.
“…The other ones, Followers and whatnot, are pure wild these days.” Skurn bobbed his head, moving continuously from one side to the other off the base of the horse’s neck like a cat trying to find the warmest place to sleep. It was a mark of how the last days had hardened Vansen’s mount that it paid little attention to the creeping thing between its shoulders, only whinnying from time to time when the indignity became too much. “Scarce speak any language, and of course no sunlander tongue, unlikes usself. There, Master, don’t ever eat that ’un, nor touch it. Will turn your insides to glass. And that other, yes, th’un with yellow berries. No, not pizen, but makes a fine stew with coney or water rat. Us’d have a lovely bit of that now, jump atter chance, us would. Knows you that soon you be crossing into Jack Chain’s land? You’ll turn, o’course. Foul, his lot. No love for the High Ones and wouldn’t lift a hand but for their own stummicks or to shed some blood. They like blood, Jack’s lot. Oh, there’s a bit of the old wall. Look up high. A fine place for eggs…”