(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay

by Tad Williams

  But I can tell you this. Queen Saqri is dying, and that which she needs most was to be found only in the old sacred place of our people—your people’s home, the castle called Southmarch. Desperation had driven us to recapture it two hundred years before, but we were driven out again. Now desperation has driven us back there once more.

  But this time, there was the matter of the gods’ restless sleep to consider. Your Southmarch is a place that touches closely on the realms of the gods. Even the Voices of the Deep Library agreed that there was a terrible chance that an attempt to recapture the sacred place and use its virtues to save Queen Saqri would wake the gods from their slumber and bring an era of blood and darkness over the earth.

  But why? Barrick could not help asking. Why would waking the gods do such a thing? He looked to Vansen, but even in the dim light he could see that the soldier had gone quite pale, as though he had just been told the incipient hour of his own death.

  “Blood and darkness…?” Vansen whispered. He looked as though he had been stabbed in the heart.

  The gods would not be able to avoid it, Gyir declared, any more than a wolf could let itself starve to death while a piece of bloody meat lay before it. Such is the nature of their godhood—they have been trapped in sleep for century upon century, powerless as great beasts caught in hunters’ nets. One of the gods’ most fearsome attributes is the mightiness of their angers. But even faced with such terror, humans would not easily give up dominion. When the gods lived on the earth in the distant past, mortals were their servants, small in numbers and weaker in self-regard, but they have grown in both wisdom and numbers. If the gods wake, there will be a war to end all wars. In the end, though, the gods will triumph and the pitiful survivors will begin sifting the ruins of their cities to build new temples to their greedy, victorious, immortal masters.

  Barrick wasn’t certain he understood everything, but it was impossible to ignore the dreadful certainty in Gyir’s thoughts.

  So in our fear of waking the gods, the House of the People became divided between those who wished to see the queen saved at any cost, led in spirit by my lady Yasammez, and those who sought some other path. That was King Ynnir’s way, and although I fear it will only delay the inevitable, or perhaps make it worse when it comes, his wishes had enough support that a compromise was made.

  We call that compromise the Pact of the Glass, and at this moment it is all that stands between your people and annihilation, because we of Yasammez’s party believe that what we serve is more important than any mercy and is worth any risk.

  Barrick felt light-headed again. And…and you still feel that way, Gyir? That killing every man, woman, and child in Southmarch would be an acceptable cost to reach your goal?

  You will never understand without knowing the true stakes. The fairy’s thoughts came to him like drips of icy water on stone. And I cannot tell you all—I have not the stature to open such secrets to mortals.

  So what are you saying? That your king and queen are at war with each other? But they’ve made some kind of truce?

  War is too simple a word, Gyir told him. When you understand that they are not only our lord and lady, husband and wife, but also brother and sister, you of all people may understand something of the complexities involved.

  They’re brother and sister…?

  Yes. Enough. I do not have time to explain the full history of my people to you, or any great urge to defend the Line of the Fireflower against the ignorance of sunlanders. Be silent and listen! Gyir’s frustration was so palpable that his words came almost like blows. The Pact of the Glass is the most fragile of wisps, but at the moment it holds. We defeated your army but we have not attacked your stronghold. But if we must, we will, and I promise you with no joy that if we do the blood will run like rivers.

  Barrick was angry now, too. Say your piece, Storm Lantern.

  I do not wish your love, man-child, only your understanding. I am sorry if you thought that friendship between us might change the facts, but the gods themselves could not undo what is coming, even if they wished to do so.

  So why do you tell us all this, curse you? If we’re all doomed, what difference does it make?

  Because as I once told you, things are still balanced on a knife’s edge. We must do what we can to keep that balance from tilting. Here. He reached into his tattered shirt and pulled out a tiny bundle wrapped in dirty rags, held it out in his open hand. This is the thing I told you about but would not show you. Now I must abandon caution, hoping you will understand the terrible danger we face and how important this is. This is the prize my lady Yasammez ordered me to carry to King Ynnir. On this small thing may rest the fate of all.

  What is it? It was smaller than the palm of Barrick’s hand, vaguely round in shape. He stared at it, bemused.

  It is the very scrying glass around which the Pact of the Glass is built. If it does not reach the king soon, Lady Yasammez will renew her attack upon Southmarch, this time without mercy.

  He handed it to Barrick, who was so surprised he almost dropped it. Why are you giving this to me?

  Because I fear that Jikuyin intends to use me in some way to open Immon’s Gate into the palace of the Earthfather. If that happens, if I am lost while I still carry the Glass, then all is lost with me.

  But why me? Barrick shook his head. I can barely stand up! I’m full of mad thoughts—I’m sick! Give it to Vansen. He’ll get it where you need it to go. He’s a soldier. He’s…honorable. He looked over to the guard captain and realized that he meant it—despite everything he had said about the guard captain, every petty dislike he had expressed, Barrick admired the man and envied his strength and determination. In another world, another Barrick would have given much to have such a person as a friend.

  I intended to, said Gyir, but I have been thinking. There was a brief silence in Barrick’s head as the fairy spoke only to Vansen, then he turned his scarlet stare back onto Barrick. Ferras Vansen is brave, but he does not carry Lady Porcupine’s touch. My lady singled you out, Barrick Eddon and gave you an errand of your own to the House of the People—one that even I do not know. Her command will carry you on when all else would fail. But it will not keep you alive if Fate intends otherwise, the fairy could not help adding, so do not be foolhardy! Ferras Vansen can go with you, but you must be the one to carry it.

  So you want me to do a kindness for the woman who wants to kill all my people?

  Must I have this argument with every sunlander who can draw breath? Gyir shook his head. Have you not listened? If this does not reach King Ynnir, then Yasammez will destroy all in her way to recapture Godsfall—your home—for our folk. If the Pact of the Glass is fulfilled there is at least a faint hope she will hold back, but only if the glass reaches the king’s hand.

  Barrick swallowed. He had spent most of his young life trying to avoid just such situations—a chance to fail, to prove that he was less than those around him, those with healthy limbs and unshadowed hearts—but what else could he do?

  Very well, if we must. He thought of the brown-eyed girl, of what she would think of him. Yes, then! Give it to me.

  Do not look into it, Gyir warned. You are not strong enough. It is a powerful, perilous thing.

  I don’t want to look into it. Barrick tucked the ragged bundle into his shirt, trying to make sure it went into the one pocket that did not have a hole.

  Ah, blessings. May Red Stag keep you ever safe on your path. The relief in the Storm Lantern’s thoughts was clear, and for the first time Barrick realized that Gyir, too, might have been carrying a painful, unwanted burden. Then Gyir abruptly stiffened, becoming as still as a small animal under the shadow of a hawk. Quickly, he said, what day is this? He turned his burning red eyes from Barrick to Ferras Vansen, who both stared back helplessly. Of course, how would you know? Let me think. Gyir laid one hand over the other and then brought them both up to cover his eyes, and for the space of perhaps two dozen heartbeats he sat that way, silent and blind to the world. We
have a day, perhaps two, he said abruptly, dropping his hands away from the smooth mask of flesh.

  A day until what? Barrick asked. Why?

  Until the ceremony of the Earthfather begins, Gyir said. The sacrifice days of the one you call Kernios. Surely you still mark them.

  It took Barrick a moment, but then as it dawned on him he turned to Vansen, who had also understood. “The Kerneia,” he said aloud. “Of course. By all the gods, is it Dimene already? How long have we been locked in this stinking place?”

  Long enough to see your world and mine end if I have the day wrong, said Gyir. They will come for us when the sacrifice days begin, and I am not yet ready.

  He would not say any more, but fell back into silence, shutting his two fellow prisoners out as thoroughly as if he had slammed a heavy door.

  It was bad enough to suppose that the Kerneia marked the day of your doom, Ferras Vansen kept thinking, but it was made far worse by being trapped deep beneath the earth with no certain way of knowing what day it was in the world outside. This must be what it had been like to be tied to a tree and left for the wolves, as he had heard some of the old tribes of the March Kingdoms had done to prisoners, stopping the condemned’s ears with mud and blindfolding their eyes so that they could only suffer in darkness, never knowing when the end would come.

  Vansen slept only fitfully following Gyir’s announcement, startled out of his thin slumbers every time Prince Barrick twitched in his sleep or some other prisoner growled or whimpered in the crowded cell outside.

  Kerneia. Even during his childhood in Daler’s Troth it had been a grim holiday. A small skull had to be carved for each family grave, where it would be set, nestled in flowers, on the first light of dawn as homage to the Earthfather who would take them all someday. Vansen’s own father had never stopped complaining about the laziness of his adopted folk in Daler’s Troth, who made their skull carvings out of soft wood. Back home in the Vuttish Isles, he would declare at least once each year, only stone was acceptable to the Lord of the Black Earth. Still, Ferras Vansen didn’t doubt that with three of his own children gone to their graves and also the resting places of his wife’s parents and grandparents to be adorned, Pedar Vansen must have secretly been grateful he could make his death-tokens in yielding pine instead of the hard granite of the dales.

  Skulls, skulls. Vansen could not get them out of his thoughts. As he had discovered when he came to the city, people in Southmarch purchased their festival skulls in the Street of Carvers, replicated in either stone or wood, depending on how much they wanted to spend. In the weeks before Kerneia you could even buy skulls baked of special pale bread in Market Square, the eye-sockets glazed dark brown. Vansen had never known what to think of that: eating the offerings that should go to Kernios himself seemed to trifle with that which should be respected—no, feared.

  But then, they always said I was a bumpkin. Collum used to make up stories to amuse the other men about me thinking thunder meant the world was ending. As if a country boy wouldn’t know about thunder!

  Thinking about poor, dead Collum Dyer, remembering Kerneia and the black candles in the temple, the mantises in their owl masks and the crowds singing the story of the god of death and deep places, Vansen wandered in and out of something that was not quite sleep and that was certainly not restful, until at last he woke up to the tramp of many feet in the corridor outside.

  The gray man Ueni’ssoh drifted across the floor as though he rode on a carpet of mist. His eyes smoldered in the dull, stony stillness of his face and even the prisoners in the large outer cell shrank back against the walls. Vansen could barely stand to look at him—he was a corpse-faced nightmare come to life.

  “It is time,” he said, his words angular as a pile of sharp sticks. The brutish guards in their ill-fitting armor spread out on either side of Vansen and his two companions.

  “For what, curse you?” Vansen raised himself to a crouch, although he knew that any move toward the gray man would earn him nothing except death at the ends of the guard’s sharp pikes.

  “Your final hour belongs to Jikuyin—it is not for me to instruct you.” Ueni’ssoh nodded. Half a dozen guards sprang forward to shackle Gyir and loop a cord around his neck like a leash on a boarhound. When Barrick and Vansen had also been shackled the gray man looked at them all for a moment, then silently turned and walked out of the cell. As the guards prodded Vansen and the others after him, the prisoners in the outer cell turned their faces away, as if the three were already dead.

  Do not despair—some hope still exists. Gyir’s thoughts seemed as faint to Ferras Vansen as a voice heard from the top of a windy hillside. Watch me. Do not let anything steal your wits or your heart. And if Ueni’ssoh speaks to you, do not listen!

  Hope? Vansen knew where they were going and hope was not a very likely guest.

  The brute guards drove them deep into the earth, through tunnels and down stairs. For much of the journey the slap of the guards’ leathery bare feet was the only sound, stark as drums beating a condemned man’s march to the gallows. Since Vansen had only seen these passages through the eyes of the creatures Gyir had bespelled, it was strangely dreamlike now to travel them in his own body. They were not the featureless stone burrows he had thought them, but carved with intricate patterns, swirls and concentric circles and shapes that might have represented people or animals. He could recognize some of the shapes on the tunnel walls, and some of them were hard to look at—great, lowering owls with eyes like stars, and manlike creatures with heads and limbs divided from their torsos and the body parts piled before the birds as though in tribute. Other ominous shapes and symbols lined the passages as well, skulls and eyeless tortoises, both symbols of the Earthfather that Vansen knew well, along with some he did not recognize, knotted ropes and a squat cup shape with stubby legs that he thought might be a bowl or cauldron. And of course there were images of pigs, the animal most sacred to Immon, Kernios’ grim servant.

  “The Black Pig has taken him!” A despairing cry rang in his head, a childhood memory—an old woman of the Dales, cursing her son’s untimely death. “Curse the pig and curse his coldhearted master!” she had screeched. “Never will I light a candle for the Kerneia again!”

  Kerneia. In a faraway land where the sun still rose and set, the crowds were likely gathering on the streets of Southmarch to watch the statue of the masked god go by, carried high on a litter. They would be drunk, even early in the morning—the litter-bearers, the crowds, even the Earthfather’s priests, a deep, laughing-sad drunkenness that Vansen remembered well, the entire city like a funeral feast that had gone on too long. But here he was instead in the heart of the Earthfather’s domain, being dragged to the god’s very door!

  A fever-chill swept over him and Vansen had to fight to keep from stumbling. He wished he could reach out to the prince, remind Barrick Eddon that he was not alone in this terrible place, but his shackles prevented it.

  The way into the cavern that held the god’s gate suddenly opened wide before them. The enormous chamber was lit by a mere dozen torches, its obsidian walls only delicately streaked with light and the ceiling altogether lost in darkness, but after the long trip through pitch-black tunnels Ferras Vansen found it as overwhelming as the great Trigon Temple in Southmarch on a bright afternoon, with color streaming down from its high windows. The gate itself was even more massive than it had seemed through the eyes of Gyir’s spies, a rectangular slab of darkness as tall as a cliff, resembling an ordinary portal only in the way that the famous bronze colossus of Perin was like a living mortal man.

  The guards prodded Vansen and the others toward the open area near the base of the exposed rock face. The slaves already assembled there, a pathetic, hollow-eyed and listless crowd watched over by what seemed almost as many guards as prisoners, shuffled meekly out of the captives’ way, clearing an even larger space in front of the monstrous doorway.

  The guards shoved the prisoners to their knees. Vansen wallowed in drifts of ston
e dust, sneezing as it billowed up around him like smoke and Barrick collapsed beside him as though arrow-shot, scarcely stirring. Vansen nudged the youth, trying to see if he had been injured somehow, but with the heavy wooden shackles around his wrists he could not move much without falling over.

  Remember what I said…

  Even as Gyir’s words sounded in Ferras Vansen’s skull, guards and workers began to stir all over the room—for a moment he thought that they had also heard the fairy’s thoughts. Then he heard a thunderous, uneven rhythm like the pounding of a mighty drum. When he realized he was hearing footfalls, he knew why the guards, even those whom nature had made helplessly crooked, suddenly tried to straighten, and why all the kneeling slaves began to moan and shove their faces against the rough floor of the great cavern.

  The demigod came through the door slowly, the chained heads that ornamented him swaying like seaweed in a tidal pool. As terrifying as Jikuyin was, for the first time Vansen could see something of his great age: the monster limped, leaning on a staff that was little more than a good-sized young tree stripped of its branches, and his great head lolled on his neck as though too heavy for him to hold completely upright. Still, as the ancient ogre looked around the chamber and bared his vast, broken teeth in a grin of ferocious satisfaction, Vansen felt his bladder loosen and his muscles go limp. The end had come, whatever Gyir might pretend. No one could fall into the hands of such a monstrous thing and live.

  The other prisoners, many of them smeared with blood from their labors, struck their heads on the floor and wailed as the demigod approached. The awful, gigantic chamber, the hordes of shrieking creatures with bloody hands and filthy, despairing faces prostrating themselves before their giant lord—for a moment Vansen simply could not believe his eyes any longer: he had lost his wits, that was all it could be. His mind was regurgitating the worst tales the deacon in Little Stell had told to terrify Ferras Vansen and the other village children into serving the gods properly.