(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay

by Tad Williams

  Just as he reached a landing, lit fitfully by a pair of guttering torches, a small shape dashed out of one of the side passages. The little, manlike creature took one look at Barrick and turned to run back the way he’d come, but Barrick lunged forward—surprising himself almost as much as the newcomer—and gripped the creature’s knotted, oily hair with the fingers of his good hand.

  “Stop or I’ll kill you,” he said. “Do you speak my tongue?”

  It was a Drow like the one which had ridden the burning wagon, tiny and gnarled, with bristling brows, a wide, onion-shaped nose and a ragged beard that covered much of its face. It was strong for its size, but the more it struggled the tighter Barrick held. He drew it toward him and laid his found blade against its face so it could not fail to notice. He struggled not to show the creature how much it hurt him just to hold the blade with his bad arm.

  “Nae hort,” it cried, the voice both gruff and high-pitched. “Nae hort!”

  It took a moment. “Don’t…don’t hurt you?” He leaned closer, glaring. “Don’t think to trick me, creature. I want to go out, but I can’t find the surface—the light. Where is the light?”

  The little man stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Yow beyst in Rootsman’s Nayste—ouren Drowhame. High in mountain, beyst, wuth caves and caves, ken? Wrong way to dayburn.”

  If he listened carefully, he could make sense of it. So he was climbing inside the mountain itself—no wonder he couldn’t find the surface! He was relieved, but if the creature considered the weak light of the shadowlands worthy of being called “dayburn,” he hoped it never found itself in the true light of day on the other side of the Shadowline.

  “How do I get out. Out to…to dayburn?”

  “Thic way.” The Drow squirmed gently until Barrick loosened his grip. It turned and pointed with a stubby, crack-nailed finger. “Yon.”

  Barrick gratefully transferred his blade to his good hand. “Very well. Lead me.”

  “Willae set a free?”

  “If you lead me to the dayburn, yes, I’ll free you. But if you try to run away from me before we get there, I’ll stick you with this!” He was sick of blood and killing, but he didn’t want to spend the rest of a short, miserable life in these caverns, either.

  Barrick didn’t know if it was a good or bad sign that the farther the creature led him, the more deserted the corridors became. They moved mostly horizontally at first, through rooms that clearly had some kind of function, mostly as storehouses stacked with bent and broken digging tools, battered, empty ore buckets, broken wagons awaiting repair, ropes and other supplies, or with less comprehensible things—piles of what looked like fired clay chips covered with incised marks, leaking bags and barrels of different colored powders, even one chamber so misty and chill that at first he thought they had stepped out of the mines at last and into the midst of a terrible winter storm. He was several paces into this last cavern before he realized they were still deep under the earth, and that the tooth-chattering cold was because the room was piled high with blocks of snow or ice. But why? And where could such things come from?

  The answer to the second came a few moments later, as he began to see what was stacked along the walls, largely hidden by the mist. Corpses, although of what it was hard to tell, because they had been quartered as if by expert butchers. His already cringing spirits plummeted even farther. What was the reason for such madness? In a trembling voice, he asked the Drow, but the creature only shrugged its ignorance.

  Was it meat? But certainly none of the prisoners had been fed any, and there hadn’t seemed enough guards to need such a monstrous supply: the frost-blanketed carcasses were stacked like kindling all around the huge room. And where did the ice itself come from? It had been cold outside, rainy and often miserable, but there had been nothing like snow, let alone such vast quantities of ice.

  Unless all this was meant just to feed Jikuyin, he thought, and his stomach lurched with horror. He shoved the little Drow to make him trot faster. Barrick could not get out of the icy cavern fast enough.

  They passed through another large storehouse cavern, this one lit only by a single small torch, and Barrick was grateful that the Drow could move more easily in the dark than he could, since he could barely see anything. As to what the piles of cloth-covered bundles in the room might be, he couldn’t tell and did not particularly want to investigate, but a stream ran through the middle of the room—he could hear its whispering progress more clearly than he could see it, since it was set in a deep crevice in the floor—and dozens of tiny, pale creatures fluttered about the room. It was only when one of them landed on his shoulder, startling him so badly he almost cut himself with his own blade trying to knock it off, that he saw the little flyers were winged white salamanders, blind gliders that came up out of the crevice in the floor like bats heeding the call of sunset. Now he could see that the pale creatures were clinging everywhere on the roof and walls of the chamber, as placid as if they basked on a hot rock in the summer sun instead of in a dark chamber deep in a mountain.

  As they came out of the salamander cavern and onto a downward sloping path, he caught at the Drow and demanded to know why they were heading back down into the depths. The bearded, pop-eyed creature looked understandably frightened of the blade at his throat, but not, as far as Barrick could tell, guilty of any wrongdoing.

  “Canna go out lest go down from Rootsman’s Nayste,” his guide explained. “Nayste is riddlin’, full o’ holes, all different roads up, down—f’Rootsman, see?”

  After wearily puzzling over this for a little while, Barrick finally decided that the little man was telling him they had to descend from something called Rootsman’s Nayste—or maybe Nest?—because he had climbed up in it too high to go straight to the gate that led out of the mines. If it was true, the little bearded man was playing him fair and he might actually soon be out in the air again.

  Even as hope surged, he could not help thinking of his lost companions. There were many times he had felt sure he would die in these tunnels, and he was still far from certain he would survive, but he had never once imagined the possibility of getting away without the other two. Now, even if he managed to escape the mines, he would still be alone in a murderous, bizarrely unfamiliar place.

  He pushed the thought away, knowing that if he didn’t the last bit of his strength would leak away and he would tumble to the ground and never get up.

  As they crossed a wide chamber lit with a thousand small tapers, which burned on the walls and ceiling like the light of the stars themselves, the little bearded man slowed and stopped. “Here beyst,” he said breathlessly, his voice hoarse with fear. “See. Fore yow beyst the dayburn.”

  Barrick stared. At the far end of the chamber there was a glimmer of light—a crack at the bottom of a door leading to freedom, perhaps—or might it be merely an illusion? “That?”

  “Ayah.” The creature stirred nervously in Barrick’s grip, but it was quite possible the Drow’s fretfulness signified only that he did not know whether or not Barrick would prove trustworthy and release him as promised.

  “Let’s go ahead, then, and see if it opens.” Barrick laughed, although he did not know why. He was light-headed at the thought of getting out, but half-certain the little man was trying to trick him. “We’ll do it together.”

  Joy washed over him as he drew closer and could see that it truly was the great front doors of wood and metal, the light spilling in where they had been left a little way open, perhaps by deserting guards. With the surprisingly strong arms of the Drow helping him he managed to tug them wider, until he thought the space was big enough for him to slip through. At another time he might have been interested in the figures and runes that had been cast in the black metal and carved into the dark wood, but now he was overwhelmed by the light of day spread before him, sumptuous as a meal.

  It was day only in the most basic sense, of course—the gray, sunless day of the shadowlands—but after his imprisonment in
the depths it felt like the brassy blaze of a Heptamene afternoon.

  So much light was also far too much for the Drow, who stepped back from the doorway waving his hands before his face and hissing like a serpent. Easing himself sideways into the gap, Barrick ignored the creature—the Drow had fulfilled his bargain, after all—but a moment later the little man staggered back into view and tumbled at Barrick’s feet, three feathered arrowshafts quivering in his back and the wounds already soaking his ragged, dirty shirt. The little creature was not dead yet, but judging by his harsh, whistling breath, he had only moments.

  “You are perfectly framed in the doorway,” a stony voice declared, stirring up echoes. “If you do anything but move slowly back toward me, my guards will shoot you. You will not die as fast as your small friend, however.”

  Barrick knew that even if he could force himself through in one try, the invisible archers would have plenty of time for an unimpeded shot. Even if he got out, he had no strength left to outrun anyone, let alone evade the arrows of trained bowmen. Barrick slowly eased himself out of the doorway and stepped back into the cavern. Standing before him, at the front of a mixed pack of apish guards and bony, quietly gabbling Longskulls, several of whom held longbows, stood the cadaverous figure of Ueni’ssoh, his eyes gleaming like blue fires.

  “You were Jikuyin’s,” the gray man said in his cold, uninflected voice. “But now you are mine. We will dig out the gateway chamber once more. Nothing has changed except who will own the god’s treasures.”

  “I’d rather die,” Barrick said, then turned and leaped toward the doorway, but something hit him in the leg like a club and he tumbled to the floor, half in and half out of the room with an arrow through his boot and a searing pain across his calf. Despite the queer, breathless ache of the wound he could feel the cool, gray light of the outside world on him like a balm, smell the sweetness of the air. Only now did he realize how foul were the stenches he had been living in so long, the smoke and blood and filth.

  So this was the ending. After all that he had done, after all the people he had tried to please…well, he had told them he wasn’t up to it, hadn’t he? He had told them he would fail—or if he hadn’t actually told them, they should have known.

  The gray man stood over him now, the bright eyes watching Barrick intently. Ueni’ssoh’s tongue flicked out, lizardlike, to touch his dry lips. “There is something…Yes, you have something. I feel it now. Something…powerful. Things begin to make more sense.”

  Barrick snarled at him, but it was hard to make words, at least any words that mattered. Then he remembered.

  The mirror. Gyir’s mirror, the sacred trust of Lady Yasammez! Barrick could feel it against his breast in the pocket of his shirt. He could not let this hairless, corpselike thing take it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

  “Silence.” The gray man reached out a bony hand that paused just above Barrick’s chest. The Longskulls and hairy-pelted guards crowded around their master, staring down like the demons in a temple fresco. “Give it to me.”

  Barrick tried to deny him again, but although the gray man was not touching him, he could feel a force tugging at the mirror under his shirt. An intense agony blossomed in his chest, as though the mirror had sunk roots into his skin and bones, as though it would not be pulled away without tearing the greater part of Barrick away as well. He shrieked, but the gray man did not even flinch; except for those moonstone eyes, Ueni’ssoh might have been carved stone.

  Barrick gripped the mirror through his shirt, but a curious weakness was already starting to spread through him. What use resisting? This creature, this gray demon, was stronger than he could ever hope to be—so much stronger…

  “No!” He knew that voice in his head. It was not his own but the gray man’s. “I won’t…!”

  A smile curved the stony lips. The pull on the mirror seemed as though it would yank Barrick’s entire body inside out. Ueni’ssoh was kneeling above him, hand held a foot above Barrick’s breast. “But you will, sunlander—of course you will. And when I have this secret thing in my hand, I will know why One-Eye was so interested in you…”

  “You can’t…!” But they were nothing but gasped words. He could not resist the gray man’s power. He would lose the mirror and lose everything.

  “Stop fighting,” said the Dreamless. His teeth were clenched, and Barrick suddenly realized that beads of sweat had formed on Ueni’ssoh’s ashy forehead.

  But I’m not fighting, Barrick thought. I wouldn’t know how, not against something like him. Still, something was resisting the gray man’s power—something was holding the Dreamless at bay.

  A great heat suddenly filled Barrick. It was the mirror itself, blossoming with power even as Ueni’ssoh tried to make it his. A light flared around them, warm and almost as brilliant as the sun itself, so strong that Barrick himself screamed out, though it caused him no pain. As the light burst forth all the guards screeched and fell back, waving their clawed hands before their eyes. A moment later the light fell back on itself, but Barrick could still feel it even so, a tingling like sparks all over his skin. Someone else was howling now, too. Like a spider that had caught a huge, murderous wasp in its fragile web, it was now Ueni’ssoh who was trying to break contact—Barrick could feel the gray man’s mounting terror, could almost smell it, or hear it like a shrill noise—but the mirror or whatever empowered it would not let the Dreamless go.

  “No!” the gray man shrieked and tried to stand up, but something invisible had clutched him and he contorted and thrashed like a living fish dropped on a hot stone. His eyes bulged, and his muscles writhed beneath the parchment skin, knotting and coiling. A moment later great black flowers of blood appeared on his face and neck and hands. The bestial guards, still howling in pain at the light that had blinded them, began stumbling away in all directions, tearing at each other in their haste to escape the growing incandescence that pulsated between Barrick’s breast and Ueni’ssoh’s still outstretched hand.

  Then the gray man caught fire.

  Ueni’ssoh jerked upright, shrieking and jigging, as the glow spread up his arm and into his chest. His eyes began to burn out of their sockets. His gaping mouth vomited flame. The guards fled barking out of the wide anteroom, back into the darkened corridors of the mine.

  When Barrick looked again the gray man was nothing but a hissing, twitching, blackening shape. The boy turned away in horror and disgust, crawling over the arrow-riddled corpse of his Drow guide in his desperation to get out into the daylight.

  Outside, he looked down the narrow valley beyond the base of the steps, bewildered. Was he really free? What had happened? Had he destroyed the gray man somehow? He didn’t think so—it had been the mirror, defending itself. But it had done nothing until the gray man had tried to take it. Would it have let Barrick be killed if the gray man had left the mirror itself alone? He didn’t know, and he certainly didn’t want to do anything to find out.

  He broke off the protruding arrowhead and pulled the arrow out of his boot, which was slippery from the blood of his slashed ankle, then he limped down the steps and onto the open ground—the end of the long road they had traveled as prisoners to come to this terrible place, however many days or even months ago that had been. Only a little more walking, however painful, and he would be out of reach of the mine’s guardians, if any were minded to follow him.

  Feeble as it was, the half-light still seemed strong to him after his days in underground darkness, and so at first Barrick did not notice the trembling of some of the huge statues in front of him until one of them swayed and then fell over, landing with a shuddering crash that almost knocked him off his feet. Two more statues toppled as the soil erupted before him in great crumbling chunks. A massive shape thrust itself up out of the earth and into the daylight.

  At first Barrick thought in weary horror that it was some unimaginably large spider from the depths, all hair and malformed, corpse-colored limbs and gleaming, dripping fluids.
But its appendages stuck out in unexpected directions, some shattered and peeling, all smoking and oozing like melted candlewax, as though the thing were some terrible combination of sea urchin or jellyfish and butchered animal. Then he finally saw the raw face hanging between two of the limbs, oozing with the glowing golden ichor that ran through it instead of blood. The horror that had cut off his escape still had a few tendrils of singed beard around the broken-toothed maw, and that single huge, mad eye.

  “You wretched little ball of shit.” The demigod’s lower jaw was shattered, drooling a liquid that looked like molten metal, and so Jikuyin’s physical voice was an unrecognizable gurgle. The words were only in his head, but so powerful despite the demigod’s countless injuries that Barrick stumbled and almost sank to his knees. “Thought I was dead, didn’t you? But we immortals aren’t so easy to kill…!”

  Barrick staggered to one side, praying he could dodge around the huge, crippled thing, but despite all his terrible wounds the demigod moved with devastating speed, scuttling crablike on his broken limbs to block the boy’s escape.

  “Not so fast, man-child. Your blood will open the god’s house and I will be made whole again. This is only an inconvenience.”

  Barrick’s head seemed too heavy to hold up any longer. He could not get past the thing and he certainly couldn’t outfight it. He could not go back, either. He was done.

  Unless…

  Barrick Eddon reached into his shirt and pulled out the mirror. For a moment he felt it warm in his hand, felt its power begin to bloom again as it had when the gray man had tried to take it, but Jikuyin held up a splayed, shattered hand—Barrick thought it must be a hand—and the burgeoning flare of light suddenly died.

  “Whatever it is,” Jikuyin told him, “it is a lesser power than mine, mortal boy.” His single, bloodshot eye no longer had the means to show expression—the meat of his face was too ravaged for that—but Barrick could tell the demigod was pleased and even amused. Barrick knew also that what Jikuyin said was true—the mirror was now cold and inert. “After all, the blood of the great gods runs in my veins…!”