Shadowheart s-4 Read online

  Shadowheart

  ( Shadowmarch - 4 )

  Tad Williams

  Tad Williams

  Shadowheart

  PART ONE

  THE KNOTTED ROPE

  1

  A Cold Fever "This Book is for all children of gentle birth, to give them instruction of the good example of the Orphan, holiest of mortals, beloved of the gods…"

  -from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"

  The distant mountains were black, as were the rocky beach and the pounding sea, and the sky was like wet gray stone; the only bright things he could see were the crests of the waves that ran ahead of the stiff breeze and the gleaming white foam that leaped toward the sky each time a wave died against the rocks.

  Barrick could scarcely take it all in. Overwhelmed by the clamor of the Fireflower voices, the inside of his head felt louder and more dangerous than the crashing surf, as though at any moment this storm of foreign thoughts, ideas, and memories might sweep him away, batter him and push him under, drown him utterly…

  … Not since Mawra the Breathless walked the world…

  … But they came not by sea as Silvergleam had expected, but from the air…

  … She was never after seen, although her lover and his pack searched the hills until the winter snows…

  It was all he could do not to scream at the unending storm of thoughts. He clenched his teeth and curled his hands into fists as he struggled to hold onto the Barrick Eddon at the center of it all. He had hoped the confusion in his thoughts would ease when the king's funeral ended, but instead the silence that followed had seemed to make it worse.

  The queen of the fairies was walking with him-or rather Saqri walked a little ahead, dressed all in billowing white so that she seemed hardly more substantial than sea foam herself. Ynnir's widow had not spoken a word to him since she had summoned him with a single imperious gesture to follow her, then led him out of the halls of Qul-na-Qar and down a winding path to the restless, dark ocean.

  They were alone, Barrick and Saqri, or as alone as they could be: three armored, manlike figures stood at the foot of the path watching every step their queen took. These were Ice Ettins, Barrick could not help knowing, part of a clan called The Whitewound, from Bluedeeps in the north. He knew their names, too, or at least the gestures they made for their names-despite all their potential for violence, the Ice Ettins were a quiet and secretive race. He knew that their dully shining armor was nothing a smith had forged, but a part of their skins, as nerveless as nails or hair; he also knew that though none stood much taller than a mortal man, each Ice Ettin with his heavy bones and horny plates would weigh at least as much as three large men. These creatures were bound to the Fireflower by their clan oath, and each had earned a place in the queen's guard through victory in one of the murderous ceremonial games that The Whitewound always conducted in icy darkness.

  Barrick knew all this as well as he knew his own name and the names of those who had raised him through childhood-but in a completely different way: all this new knowledge, countless histories and namings and connections and even more subtle things that could not be named but simply were, all these delicate understandings shouted and muttered in his head-shouted, but without noise. Barrick could not look at anything, even his own hand, without a thousand intricately foreign Qar ideas battering his thoughts like a sudden hailstorm-bits of poetry, scholarly associations, and countless far more meaningless and mundane memories. But these storms of knowledge were as the balmiest spring weather compared to the swelling of imagination and memory that crashed over him when he looked at anything significant-the towers of Qul-na-Qar or the distant peak of M'aarenol, or, worst of all, at Queen Saqri herself.

  … When she first as a child stood in snow, laughing…

  … The night her mother died and she took the Fireflower, and her sense of what should be would not let her weep…

  … Her eye, knowing…

  … Her lips, warm and forgiving after that terrible fight…

  The associations went on and on, unstoppable, and Barrick Eddon was terrified by how little he could do beyond holding onto those parts of himself he could still recognize.

  I was a fool to agree to this, he thought. It is like the story of the greedy merchant-I will get everything I wanted, but it will fill me until I swell like a toad and then burst like a bubble.

  Saqri suddenly stopped and turned toward him-a graceful transition from motion to absolute stillness. She used words to speak out loud but he heard them in his thoughts as well, where the meanings were subtly different. "I have thought all the day and I still do not know whether to embrace you or destroy you, manchild," Saqri told him. "I cannot understand what my beloved great-aunt thought she was doing." A tiny shift of the mouth betokened a scowl. "I stopped wondering at my late husband's actions long ago."

  Her thoughts came with a sting even sharper than the wind off the booming black sea. "It isn't…" He fought to keep his concentration through the flurry of foreign recollections and impulses. "It doesn't matter anyway. What she wanted. She sent me and… and then your husband gave me the Fireflower."

  She looked at him with an expression that did not quite reach compassion. "Is it painful, then, child?"

  "Yes." It was hard to think. "No, not painful. But it… I think it is too much for me. That soon it will… drown me…"

  She took a few steps toward him, her head tilted a little to one side as if she listened. "I cannot feel you the way I could always feel him-but nevertheless, you are there. How strange! You are truly shih-shen'aq." It was a thought that did not become a word in his language, but still blew toward him with its meaning trailing-flowered, enbloomed, blossomhearted: it meant to blaze with the inner complexity and responsibility of the Fireflower.

  "But what does that mean?" he begged her. "Is there no way my thoughts can be quieted? I'll go mad. The noise, it's getting… stronger!" And had been since Ynnir had passed it to him, a fever in his blood just as terrible and mortal as the illness that had nearly killed him back in Southmarch, but a fever without heat, something altogether different than any earthly malady. "Please… Saqri… help me."

  Something moved in her face. "But there is nothing I can do, manchild. It is like asking me to save you from your blood or your own bones. It is in you now-the Fireflower is you." She turned away to look toward the ocean. "And it is more than that. It is all of my family-all we have learned and all that we are. One half of it is in you. It may kill you." She lifted her hands in a deceptively small gesture, whose meanings rippled out in every direction-Defeat is Ours was one meaning, a strange mixture of resignation, terror, and pride. "And the other half is in me and will certainly die with me." She looked up, and for the first time he thought he saw something like pity in her hard, perfect face. "Take courage, mortal. The ocean has beat at this black shore since the gods lived and fought here, but it has not devoured the land. Someday it will, but that day has not yet come."

  Everything she said set off ripples in Barrick's head like stones cast into a pond, each ripple intersecting with a dozen more and filling him with half-glimpsed memories and ideas for which the language of his thoughts had no proper words.

  Black shore…

  The first ships foundered here, but the second fleet survived.

  The ones who sing beneath the waves… Listen!

  It was like standing in a temple bell tower while the great bronze bells thundered the call to prayer. The voices seemed to shake him to his bones-but at the same time the attack was as silent as a subtle poison. "Oh, gods. I can't… stand it."

  "But why did she do it?" Saqri scarcely seemed to hear him, looking up to the cloud-painted sky as if the answer might be swirling th
ere. "I can understand Ynnir giving the Fireflower to a mortal, mad as it is-my husband would have taken any gamble, no matter the danger, to try to craft peace. But why would Yasammez mock him with that which she herself holds most dear? Why would she send you to him in the first instance?"

  Her great age, voices suggested. Even the mightiest can decay…

  Hatred, said others, full of anger themselves. Yasammez has built her great house on the rock of her hatred…

  Barrick couldn't understand why none of them, not Saqri, not the even the Fireflower voices, suggested that which was so obvious to him. Did they really understand so little of despair, these people who should have understood it better than any-who saw their lives as an inevitable defeat lasting thousands of years?

  "She wasn't… mocking the king," he said, struggling to make words out of the cacophony of his thoughts and senses. "She was mocking… herself."

  Saqri whirled to stare at him. For a moment, by the weird, stony look on her face, Barrick thought she would strike him, or call her Ice Ettins to take off his head. Instead, she tilted her head back and laughed, a throaty burst of anger and amusement that caught him utterly by surprise.

  "Oh! Oh, manchild!" she said. "You have taught me something. We must not let such a rarity end too quickly! I will honor my great-grandmother's wishes, no matter how obscure their origin, and we will try to find a way to mute the Fireflower, at least until you have learned to live with it."

  "Can… can such a thing be done?"

  She laughed again, but sadly. "It never has been. It was never necessary. But there has never been a scion of the Fireflower quite like you, either."

  Like a walking white flame, she led him back over the black sands to the foot of the stone stairs where her armor-skinned warriors stood waiting, their eyes only glints deep beneath plated brows. The row of huge creatures parted with surprising grace to let her lead Barrick past, then fell in behind and followed them back up the winding hill-steps to Qul-na-Qar.

  It was worse for him inside the castle: the ancient walls and passages put so many thoughts into his head that the voices in his skull swooped and chattered like bats startled from their roosts; it was all he could do to follow Saqri. A few times he stumbled, but felt the broad, stone-hard hand of one of the queen's escort close on his arm and hold him up until he found his feet again.

  The Ice Ettins were not the only ones following them now. As soon as Saqri had entered the castle, a flock of shapes had appeared almost as suddenly as the Fireflower voices-Qar of every shape and appearance-but they seemed hardly even to notice Barrick. It was Saqri they surrounded, their voices full of worry and even fear for her health, and those who could not speak through the heavy air found other ways to make their unhappiness known, so that a cloud of dismay followed Barrick and the queen across the great central halls and down the Weeping Staircase. It felt as though the jabber of their thoughts and the whirl of Fireflower memories were pounding away at his wits like a hailstorm.

  Barrick stumbled again. He was no longer certain how to make his legs work properly.

  "I… can't…" he tried to say, then stopped to stare at Saqri, her guards, and supplicants. They were all changing, stretching, shredding like shapes made of smoke under the barrage of so much noise, so much life, so much memory. He couldn't remember what it was he had been about to say. Their now-unrecognizable forms curled into a dwindling whirlpool of color in the midst of the blackness and the clamor in his head suddenly went quiet. As the spin of light gurgled away, he fell into nothing, but he accepted the darkness with gratitude.

  "Come back," the voice whispered. "Step out and join me, manchild. The light is good here."

  He did not know who he was or who spoke to him. He did not know where he was, or why the darkness that surrounded him felt so immense-a place where you could fall for a thousand years before you even realized you were falling…

  "Come back." A minute flicker of light, the faintest possible glimmer, appeared before him. "Come here. Come and run in these green fields with me, child. Where you were going is too cold."

  He opened his eyes, or at least that was how it seemed: the blur of light spread and deepened. Green and blue and white, the colors burst out, and he felt like he drank them down as a thirsty man gulps water. The clouds, the grass, the distant hills… and what was this new thing? Something white skimming toward him down the gray sky, a great bird with wings so wide they seemed as if they would brush a cloud with each tip: it was Saqri, of course, wearing a dream-form-or perhaps he was learning something deep and true about her that could only be experienced here.

  "Run with me!" the swan called to him in the fairy queen's gentle, musical voice. "Run! I will follow you."

  Fixed on the beautiful white bird, his senses swimming with delight, he spread his own wings to leap toward her, only to realize he was not a winged thing at all but a creature of hooves and strong legs and long strides. As he bolted out over the green meadows there seemed little difference between what he did now and what he would have done with wings. It was a wonderful freedom-it felt right.

  "Where is this place?" he called.

  "It is not a matter of 'where' but of something different… 'how,' perhaps…"

  He found he did not care. It was enough simply to run, to feel the wind making his mane and tail snap, to thrill to the thunder of his own hooves as they tore the grass beneath his feet into flying clods.

  She skimmed past him and for a moment was content to fly just a little way ahead, matching his pace so that she seemed to float, rowing herself through the air with her vast pinions, black-beaked head on a neck long as a spear. "Are you weary, child?" she called. "Would you like to stop?"

  "Never!" He laughed. "I could do this forever." And it seemed like he had never said anything more true-that there would be no greater heaven than to run here forever, fit and strong and free of everything.

  But what is this place? His stride faltered a little. Where am I? I was… I'm not… He felt his powerful body carrying him across the face of the world on four striding legs. But I'm not a horse… I'm a man…!

  Heaven. Is this heaven? Does that mean I'm dead?

  And suddenly he shuddered to a stop, the hills suddenly high and close, the sky darker, everything near and threatening. "Where am I?" he said again. "What have you done to me?"

  The swan banked and circled. "Done to you? Those are hard words, Barrick Eddon. I brought you back when I could have let you go. I brought you back."

  "From where?"

  "From what is next."

  "I was… dying?" A chill stabbed him deep in his center. Even through this fevered excitement, he could suddenly feel how close he had come.

  "Do not fear it. It is a road all of us must tread one day… all of us except the gods, that is."

  "What do you mean?" He was trying to look down at his curious body but his head and neck were not well-shaped to do so. It felt unfamiliar-but also strangely familiar. "You mean everybody dies? But you don't. You and the king and all your ancestors… you don't."

  "We will see. If the Fireflower leads you to share our fate, you will be able to judge for yourself what kind of immortality our gift gives to us."

  The great bowl of meadow surrounded by hills seemed to grow darker still, as if a storm rushed in overhead, but in truth the mixed skies had not changed. "And this place? If I'm not dead, this isn't Heaven."

  The swan stretched her beautiful neck. "It is not-although names are at best troublesome in these lands. It is another place. One that I could not be certain you would cross, or even reach, as you began to slip away from the places of the living-there is much I do not know about your people. But it was the only place I could have found you before it was too late, and the only place where I could be strong enough to hold you until you could make your own choice to return to the world or not."

  Suddenly, as if a door had been thrown open, letting light in, he remembered. "It was the voices-all the… the things I knew. Th
e Fireflower. And it felt like I was knowing more every moment…!" He felt his four feet restless beneath him suddenly, his entire body tensed to run.

  "Of course," she said, and for the first time since he had first heard it he found her voice soothing. "Of course. It is difficult enough for one of our kind-how much stranger and more painful for one of your folk. That is why we are seeking help for you." A flicker of spread wing, a sunbeam of white blazing before his eyes, and she was off again. "So follow! We will go where mortals do not venture, except for those rare few that can dream a path. Those travelers pay for their journey with their happiness and their rest. Who knows what those like us, we who have neither rest nor happiness, will be asked to pay?"

  Up into the hills he ran, following the dim form of the swan as it darted low over the grass ahead of him. The trees snapped past him like arrows and his legs drove him tirelessly as he ran from twilight into true darkness.

  He ran so fast he could not feel the air, but nevertheless the cold grew in him, crystals of ice forming in his blood as they might on the surface of a slow-moving river as winter settled in. And as the cold and darkness grew, he crossed into a land where the hills grew naked of grass and great piles of stones loomed, each one somber and alone despite the thousands of others that surrounded it. The light now was as pale as that which fell from a waning moon, but there was no moon, only a black sky and a glow that painted the standing heaps of stone as though they were not whole things with weight and breadth but only spirits of stones gleaming in an unending midnight.

  And as they passed farther and farther into this quiet, disheartening realm, the swan flickering low on the horizon was the only thing that reminded him of what daylight had been. A little of who he was and what he was doing came back to him.

  Barrick Eddon. Son of the king of Southmarch. Brother of Briony… and of Kendrick.