Shadowheart s-4 Page 9

  "But the Qar are gone, Highness," Tolly said. "Have you not heard?"

  "Gone? What do you mean?" She looked as though she suspected a trick.

  "Just that-they have left. If you do not believe me, have your maids ask anyone they choose. The Qar have broken camp and withdrawn. They are gone from our shore."

  "Truly?"

  "Truly. And now, if you will forgive me, Highness, I have much pressing business awaiting my attention. I ache that I cannot spend more time with you and the heir, but if you wish him to have a kingdom to inherit, then there is still much work for me to do."

  It was not quite that easy; at least a quarter of an hour more passed before Tolly managed to withdraw from the queen's presence. His mood had not improved. "Does she think I am a fool?" he snarled as he led Tinwright down the stairs. "Does she not realize I have spies everywhere, even in her chambers? I know every treacherous, complaining thing she has said about me. She is fortunate I need her for at least a little longer…" He looked up as if noticing Tinwright for the first time in a while. "Speaking of spies, poet, you have never told me who you serve."

  Tinwright's heart slammed in his chest like a fist pounding on a door. "Wh-what…?"

  Hendon Tolly rolled his eyes. "Wait, now I remember-I told you I didn't care. And it's true. Because after tonight, you will either be dead or you will belong to me body and soul, little versifier." He seemed distracted now. "Yes, tonight. I suppose you think I seduced the queen because I wanted power," he said suddenly.

  Tinwright could only stammer.

  "Or the pleasure of bedding a king's wife." He spat on the floor. "Ah, well, I suppose in a way, I did do it for power-but not the way you think." He stopped on a stair landing, then held back the guards with a wave of his hand. The lord protector leaned closer to Tinwright and said softly, "I did it to give myself time, because time will bring me power-more power than you can imagine. Oh, you will see tonight, poet. You will see power and beauty beyond your ability to imagine, beyond the wit of even a bard like Gregor of Syan to describe. You will see her. Yes, you will see her and then you will truly understand."

  After a long silence, Tinwright finally found the courage to speak. "Understand, my lord?"

  Tolly looked at him with amusement on his sharp, clever face, but something altogether stranger in his eyes. "Yes. When you meet the goddess who loves me."

  Matt Tinwright was out of his depth. "You are taking me to meet… a woman?"

  "No, you fool, do you not listen? Does no one in this cursed place have even a copper's worth of wit? I said a goddess and that is what I meant. Tonight you will meet her, and she will tell us how to defeat the autarch." Suddenly, without warning, Tolly slapped Tinwright so hard the young poet almost fell down. As Tinwright stood swaying, holding his bruised cheek, the lord protector looked at him, his face now stern and cold. "Stop staring and follow me, lout. There is much work to do before I can see my bride-to-be again."

  Theron the Pilgrimer had grown used to traveling with the boy and his mysterious, hooded master. Each evening the boy made sure the hooded man was fed, then joined Theron at the fire to eat his own supper with silent haste. It wasn't really surprising; the hooded man himself spoke only to the boy, and the boy often seemed more of a tame animal than an ordinary child, and he used words only when necessary. Theron was a sociable man and it all made for a bleak fellowship… but the money was good. The money was very good.

  The Marrinswalk Road had still been well traveled as far as Oscastle, but as the walls of that city had disappeared behind them, so too had most of the crowds. Only a few travelers were still to be found between the Marrinswalk border and the first Southmarch town on the road, but they all had fearful stories to tell of the lands beyond and the chaos that had overtaken the north.

  "Bandits?" said one traveler who stopped to share a meal with them. He was a traveling merchant with a wagon and two helpers, and he had contributed a sack of dried peas and some millet to the stew. Theron had been fortunate enough to snare a rabbit that morning, so up to this point it had been a merry evening. "Oh, aye, there are bandits in plenty between here and Brenn's Bay, but that's the least of your problems."

  "Least?"

  "I should say so. Still, they have ravaged the country all around and take what they please from anyone they find."

  "How did you get past them?" Theron asked.

  "By paying them, of course," said the merchant with a harsh laugh. "These are bandits, not madmen. In their way, they are men of business. Mercy of Honnos, I made sure they know that I pass this way every other tennight and that I would pay them both directions. Two silvers it costs me each trip, but my skin is worth that to me and more. I suggest you tell them the same."

  Theron reflected ruefully on the gold the hooded man had given him-the most money he had ever had. What were the chances such outlaws would not search his belongings? Where could he hide so much gold? "You said they were the least of my problems. Is there no other way north to Southmarch?"

  The merchant gave him a strange look. "Southmarch? Fellow, what madness would lead you there? Do you not know what has happened?"

  "I know the fairies have come out of the north again after all these years. I know they have besieged the city there."

  "You make it sound so ordinary, Brother Pilgrimer!" The merchant shook his head and had one of his servants bring him more ale. He generously had another cup poured for Theron as well, then looked over to Theron's silent, hooded client and raised his eyebrows, questioning.

  "He might take some. He is a strange one, though, so he may turn it down."

  "No matter." The merchant had his servant pour another cup and take it to the hooded man's youthful servant. The boy's master accepted it without comment but did not even turn to acknowledge the kindness. "No matter," the merchant repeated, but he sounded a little nettled.

  "Tell me what you mean, sir," Theron asked. "I've had so little good intelligence of what is ahead. Have you seen the fairies? What are they like? Do they threaten honest travelers?"

  "Some say they eat honest travelers," the merchant said with a hard smile. "But I've met no one who claims it's happened to anyone they know. Not so with the bandits. Not only have I met those myself, I've met others who could not make compact with them and were robbed and beaten for their troubles. Some lost companions. The outlaws in this lonely place are desperate and cruel."

  "Oh, Holy Three preserve us!" said Theron in fright. "How can we avoid these people? Is there any way to get around them?"

  "The cleverest thing to do is to turn around and go back to Oscastle or whence you came," the merchant said sternly. "If you cannot do that, you must choose between the bandits and the fairies. The bandits haunt the roads. If you would avoid them, you must take the forest track through the Northern Whitewood, and then… well, who knows what you may find?"

  "Have you seen these fairies?" Theron asked again. "What do they look like? Are they fierce?"

  The merchant shook his head. "I have stayed upon the road, so I have seen little out of the ordinary. But I have seen enough. Riders on the hillside by evening, dressed in the old, old way, with armor that gleamed like moonlight. A flock of women speeding across the grass at midnight, in a place no woman would dare show herself, let alone run naked. Yes, I've seen some strange things, Pilgrimer, and heard others that I had no wish to see at all. And the dreams that come to a man these days when he travels in the north…! Night after night I have woken in a sweat, sometimes crying out so that my helpers hurried to my side, thinking me deathly ill or stung by a serpent. There are voices that echo in the hills and in the forest deeps, and shadows that move when there seems no light to throw them…"

  "Enough!" said Theron, shuddering. "No more tales, thank you. I have scarcely the courage to stay here all tonight, let alone to go forward."

  "It is not all terrible," the merchant said suddenly. He stared into the flickering fire. "There is… sometimes… a kind of beauty in things I've seen�
� or almost seen…"

  But Theron had no urge to discover such strange, unhomely kinds of beauty, and began to think about when the time might come to turn back.

  The boy, Theron had finally learned, was named Lorgan. It was a Connordic name, although the boy said he had lived in Oscastle all his life until now.

  "How did you come to be traveling with the stranger, lad?" Theron asked one night over the stewpot. In comparison to the night the merchant had joined them, this was much thinner fare indeed, closer to porridge than a stew, since there had only been enough dried fish to flavor things, but it was warm and the fire was bright and that meant something when you were half a day off the South Road in the lonely woods.

  "Told you. He asked me." The boy scooped out some more stew with the crust of hard bread.

  "What about your ma and da? Didn't they mind, you going off?"

  "Dead."

  "What happened?"

  Lorgan looked up at him in puzzlement as if it was some kind of strange, foreign custom to ask a child about his parents. "Fever took 'em."

  Getting answers was like trying to lift a bucket with a feather. "And what happened to you? Where did you live?"

  The boy shrugged.

  "And then he…" Theron nodded his head toward the hooded man, who as usual was sitting by himself away from the others, his head down on his knees as though he slept, although from here Theron could hear him mumbling, "… he paid you to go with him? To help him?"

  The boy shrugged again. "Said he needed eyes and ears. And someone to talk loud for him, because his throat's so sore hurt."

  "What happened to him? Did he tell you?" The stranger was so miserly with showing even an inch of skin that Theron still half-feared he might be a leper, for all his reassurances.

  "He was dead. He told me so." Lorgan scoured the last of the stew from the pot and sucked his fingers, restless as an animal, ready to move now that he had fed.

  "He can't have been dead and be alive now. That doesn't happen. Nobody comes back from being dead except the Orphan. Nobody can do it."

  "The gods can do it," the boy said, licking his lips and chin for anything he might have missed.

  "You're not trying to tell me he's a god, are you?"

  "No. But they could have made him alive, couldn't they? The gods can do what they please." The boy shrugged one last time, then went off to throw rocks at trees until the last of the light was gone. The conversation was clearly over. Theron had to admit to himself that he couldn't prove the child wrong-the gods, it was said, could certainly do anything they wanted. It was just that helping mortal men didn't seem to be something they wanted much.

  It was just across the border into Southmarch, in the Vale of Aulas where the forests grew so thick on either side of the road that the sun only appeared just before noon and vanished shortly thereafter, Theron Pilgrimer saw real fairies for the first time. It was not quite dark, and he was walking back toward the camp with wet boots on his feet and his arms full of mallow roots he had dug up at the edge of the stream when he saw something moving across the forest track before him. In some way, the figures seemed quite ordinary, so much so that for a heartbeat or two Theron did not even wonder why a procession of men dressed in black would be walking slowly across a deer path deep in the Northern Whitewood. Then he saw that these men were as small as children, barely half his own size, and the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rose. They were dressed in black cloaks and odd, wide-brimmed hats, and just behind them, crossing the path as he stared, came a wagon drawn by two black-and-white-spotted boars-a coffin-wagon bearing a single, unlovely wooden box. As the pigs snuffled at the ground, the wagon rolled to a stop, and the driver, dressed in black like the others, turned to look at Theron. The little man's face was pale and round and too large for his body. It was all Theron could do to hold his urine. He felt certain that if the little men made the slightest move toward him, he would faint dead away, but the driver only stared at him incuriously for a moment, then shook the reins and urged his grunting steeds forward. Within moments, the funeral procession, if that was what it was, had vanished into the forest.

  Theron was still shaking when he got back to camp.

  The guards who accompanied the lord protector and Tinwright on their mysterious errand out of the residence were big, hard-faced men wearing the Tollys' Boar and Spears-Hendon's personal soldiers. Even more disturbing to Matt Tinwright was that Tolly was clearly leading this little procession back to the place where Okros had died, the Eddon family vault near the Erivor Chapel.

  Tinwright didn't like graveyards. His childhood years living next to one in Wharfside had given him many bad dreams-the stone crypts like little houses always made him think about their invisible residents, and his father's stories about a time when heavy rains had washed bones out of the graveyard right into Wharfside's main street had only made the nightmares worse. Still, he had no choice but to follow.

  Tinwright couldn't help wondering why they were entering the vault from outside, through its ceremonial entrance instead of through the narrow stairwell that wound down from the Erivor Chapel itself, so that the family might lay flowers or otherwise commune with their departed ancestors.

  "Give me the torch." Hendon Tolly reached out and took the burning brand from one of the guards. "Poet, you carry the mirror."

  A guard handed him the heavy bundle-rather eagerly, Tinwright thought. The stairway down into the vault was narrow and surprisingly steep; he had to concentrate just to keep his balance. As he reached the bottom, he avoided looking as long as he could at the spot where Okros had lain, but that was precisely where Tolly was headed. To his relief, the physician's body was gone.

  Tolly slid the torch into a bracket, then took the bundle from Tinwright and began to unwrap it.

  Matt Tinwright had been far too frightened to examine the vault the last time he'd been inside it. The stonework was spare but graceful, the walls honeycombed with niches, each filled with its own stone sarcophagus. Beside the stairwell up to the Eddon family chapel there was at least one door that led back from the chamber in which they stood, presumably to other catacombs.

  Tinwright's father had once told him that the royal vault of the Broadhall Palace in Tessis was so famous for its size and grandeur that people called it "The Palace Below." It was even a popular trysting-place for courting couples because it had so many quiet nooks and corners. Tinwright could no more imagine a couple choosing to bill and coo in the Eddon vault than in a butcher shop. This place took its spirit from the ruling family's gloomy, Connordic side; in this dark stone chamber, death was not the beginning of a glorious afterlife; it was simply the end of this life.

  "There." Tolly had unwrapped the mirror and set it on top of a monument, letting it lean slightly against the wall. It was obviously an unusual object. For one thing, it had a slight but unmistakable outward curve from left to right. Also, the frame itself had been painted over so many times in so many dark shades that whatever carvings were underneath had been obscured and the frame had the look of something grown, not built. "Now it is time for you to play your part, poet."

  "But… but what is my part?" Was there any chance he could simply run for it? Quick as Hendon Tolly was, it would still take him a moment to draw his sword-how far up the steps could Tinwright get by then? And would the guards be ready to stop him? What if Tolly called to them? He realized with a very uncomfortable looseness in his bowels and tightness in his chest that he didn't dare to risk it. Maybe Okros had been unlucky. Maybe something would happen that would take the lord protector's attention and allow Tinwright a better chance to escape.

  Tolly took a step toward him, and even though Tinwright was taller than the lord protector, he felt as though he were looking up at Hendon's glare from the bottom of a hole. "Listen carefully, you witless blatherskite. I must know if you can take that dead fool Okros' place for the summoning ritual-Midsummer is only short days away. If you cannot help open the way to the land of the god
s, I'll have to find someone who can. You would then be useless to me, of course, so if you want to last a little longer, I suggest you serve me well." Hendon Tolly passed him a book covered in tanned leather. Tinwright looked at it with horror. "Just open it, you white-livered fool," Tolly growled. "That is cowhide that binds it, not human flesh. It is Ximander's book-even you must have heard of that. Open it!"

  Reluctantly, Tinwright did. He had not read ancient Hierosoline in years, but his schoolteacher father had made certain his son could read the old, great books. If he had not been so terrified, it might have been an interesting experience-he had heard of Ximander's famous book and its strange predictions and tales, but he had never seen it. The actual title appeared to be, "A Diversitie of Truthfull Thinges, from the pen of Ximandros Tetramakos."

  "Here," Tolly said. "I will show you the page. You will read, and only read, until I tell you to do something different."

  "Read out loud?"

  "Yes, fool. You are not reading for your pleasure, you are invoking a goddess."

  "A goddess…?" Tinwright swallowed. Was Tolly serious? Did he truly think he could speak to the gods as though he were one of the Oniri, the sacred oracles that carried the gods' words to a waiting world? But the oracles were blessed folk, beloved of the gods, men and women of such purity and piousness that they could touch the will of Heaven itself. Hendon Tolly was a murderer, a rapist, and usurper.

  Tinwright did not, however, point any of this out.

  "Read this, Lord?" To his dismay, the language was nothing so ordinary as ancient Hiersoline, but instead some strange, unreadable tongue he had never seen before. "I do not know these words…"

  "Stop sniveling and get to it," Tolly said. "Make the best sense of it you can. You are not charming empty-headed women here, but speaking words of power."