Shadowheart (86 page)

“Don’t do it, Matt!” Elan’s voice was as ragged as Tinwright’s stinking grave-clothes. “Not the child! My life, your life—nothing is worth such a crime ... !”

He could not bear to listen to her. Each word felt like the sting of a whip. He lowered the knife until it touched the baby’s throat. At the feel of the cold metal, little Alessandros woke and began to cry again and Tinwright hurriedly lifted it so he didn’t accidentally cut the infant’s soft skin. He could not bear to look at the squirming baby, so he closed his eyes.

Nothing
, he told himself.
Nothing I can do. Nothing. It might as well not be happening. I could be asleep. All a dream.
He groped for the child’s heaving chest until he found it, let the fingers of his free hand rest gently upon it.
Nothing.

Hendon Tolly was reading now, more words from before history, last uttered in the days of the unmourned Shadow Lords or chanted over a rock tomb in the southern forests when Hierosol itself was yet to be.

It was more than an invocation they had been reading, Tinwright dimly realized, it was a challenge—a challenge to the gods themselves, the death-song of some heathen king who claimed that the grave would not hold him, that the gods themselves would not be able to restrain him.

He could hear something else behind Tolly’s words, a soft sound that nevertheless was coming from all around him, quiet bumping, scratching, as though in every box in the great vault something was stirring into movement.

Matt Tinwright opened his eyes. He could see nothing except the flickering of the torches, which bent in a sudden draft, but the soldiers were staring around wildly. The scraping grew louder, as though rats were gnawing their way out of the walls. Two of the guards suddenly bolted for the next chamber. Hendon Tolly watched them go, his eyes bulging with rage, but his chant was growing louder and it seemed he did not dare to stop.

And now Tinwright could feel something more than merely the restlessness of ancient kings disturbed in their moldering slumber. A hatefully familiar presence lurked somewhere just beyond the edges of what the poet could see and smell and hear, the same thing that had stalked him in the mirror. It was as close as it had ever been; he could feel its attention pinioning him as if he were an insect on a tabletop. It was old and strong and had as little interest in Tinwright’s mortal thoughts and feelings as he did in the hopes and cares of a stone. And it was drawing closer. . . .

... said Hendon Tolly, his voice rising to a pitch that might have meant terror or exultation—or a grotesque combination of the two.

Tinwright’s gaze flicked helplessly back and forth between the ivory throat of the child and the flushed, pop-eyed face of Hendon Tolly, as apoplectically caught up in his own words as any wandering madman. A few yards away Elan M’Cory had slumped silently in a faint, but the remaining guards still held her tightly, their own faces gray with fear.

“Now!” Tolly shrieked. “Now, you wretch, lift the knife while I speak the final words! Then spill the blood and wash the mirror in it!”

Matt Tinwright’s arm rose as if it was not attached to his own body any longer, and hung above the restless child. The flames of the torches were sucked first this way, then another. Shadows capered across the walls. The rustling all around him became loud cries and stamping sounds—were the dead rising all at once? Would the living all be pulled down into darkness this day?

He could not make his arm move. He knew Tolly would kill him if he didn’t, but he just could not harm the child.
Please, all you kind gods, help me ... !

Something struck Tinwright so hard that at first he thought Hendon Tolly had hit him with the heavy grimoire. He stumbled back a step and the knife slipped from his suddenly strengthless fingers and clattered to the stone flags.

Tinwright stared in horror at the arrow quivering in his own chest, so close to his face that only the feathers on the end told him what it was that had struck him. He could feel warm blood running down his belly and soaking into his foul, muddy garments. Then everything spun away and Matt Tinwright’s world went dark.

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

 

 

 

G
REENJAY, leader of the Qar’s Trickster tribe, climbed back out of the door in the stone flags with little of her usual grace. Fury sparked in her eyes. “A hundred paces below us the stairs are crammed with southern soldiers. This autarch has stolen a trick from the drows—we will have to win each yard forward with blood. We will not catch him this way, may the wind eat his name as well as his footprints!”

“He leaves us no choice,” Saqri said to Barrick. “Come, manchild—the ropes must be ready now. They will have to be our way down. Haste!”

Barrick followed Saqri back through the Maze, its passages still littered with rubble and the corpses of men and Funderlings. Saqri’s soldiers had prepared ropes so her troops could quickly descend to the bottom of the cavern and the Sea in the Depths; those who were too heavy, or simply not built for climbing, would make their way down the narrow trails that crisscrossed the rocky cliff.

Aesi’uah was waiting for them, several rope-ends in her hand like a bouquet of silvery catkins. “Most of the southerners have already made their way out of the tunnels and up onto the surface of the island,” she told them.

Barrick, whose vision was not as sharp as Saqri’s, squinted into the distance, trying to make out the dark forms across the island in the middle of the silvery sea. Behind it loomed the silhouette of the colossal Shining Man.

“Some of the autarch’s men are building boats,” said Saqri. “They have brought what they needed with them.” She frowned; it was strange to see even such a small show of emotion on her smooth face. “We have underestimated him—even Yasammez has. This Sulepis knows the ground as well as if he had scouted it himself.”

“But why boats?” Barrick asked. “He and his soldiers are already on the island.”

“Because he knows that with his men holding the tunnels he used to get past us, we will be forced to attack him from this side of the Sea in the Depths. He wants to send troops across to keep us at bay.” Saqri made the gesture
Unwilling Blindness
. “We can waste no more time in talk. Grab a rope, Barrick Eddon! Every heartbeat brings us closer to catastrophe.”

And that catastrophe, he could not help understanding, would be nothing like the Great Defeat that Saqri and her kin had been awaiting all these centuries as a lover anticipates the return of the beloved. This end would be something much different—dark, wild, and pointless.

 

The ropes creaked, but despite their astounding slenderness, they held. Every now and then one or the other of Barrick’s feet slipped and his body spun away from the cliff face, and in those perilous, nauseating intervals he could see boats pushing off from the island onto the odd, metallic sea. And each boat, he knew, was full of Xixian soldiers, men ready to paint over their own fear—which now, in this strange place, must be great indeed—with the blood of as many Qar and Funderlings as they could destroy.

He looked back up to the clifftop where Ferras Vansen and the Funderlings were finishing up their own slower, more cautious rigging, preparing to descend and join the Qar in what Barrick could not help feeling would be at best a glorious shared suicide.

“Remember Greatdeeps!” he shouted to Vansen, and his voice echoed from the cavern’s distant walls. The guard captain raised one hand in a salute.

Barrick had surprised himself. Why should he do such a thing? There was nobody more human than Vansen, with his stolid goodwill and his unthinking loyalty, and there was no mortal less human than Barrick Eddon had become, the Fireflower smoldering in his heart and thoughts. What did he care for mortals and mortal things?

Pinimmon Vash had seen many strange places, from the secret water dungeons underneath the Orchard Palace to the infamous crypts of the Mihannid Blue Kings, and even the autarch’s own family tomb, the legendary Aeyrie of the Bishakh which stood out against the sky as if it had grown from the very stone of Mount Gowkha . . . but he had never seen anything quite like this.

The cavern itself—well, it seemed foolish even to call it a cavern. This immense chamber deep in the earth appeared to Vash to be almost a quarter the size of the entire Orchard Palace in Xis with all its grounds. Veins of dimly shining stone and knobs of glittering crystal in the cavern’s arching walls made it seem some kind of celestial model built to grace a god’s table, but in the middle, almost directly above Vash’s head, stretched only darkness. Any roof to the great cavern was much higher above their heads than the feeble light of the Xixian torches could reach. The sensation, Vash thought, was that of looking up from the bottom of a deep well.

He stood, with the rest of the autarch’s army, on the island at the center of the Sea in the Depths, but it was the Shining Man—the mountainous, man-shaped lump of dull stone at the heart of the island—that truly dumbfounded and oppressed Vash. It wasn’t a statue. No hands, human or otherwise, had crafted it as a replica of some actual being. Instead, it had the look of something cruder, as if someone had poured molten gem-stones into the impression a man had made falling headlong into mud. But there was more to it than that. Although at the moment it glimmered only with the reflected, refracted light of the chamber itself, Vash had seen a stronger glow throb briefly within it, like a candle guttering behind old glass, and his hairs had stood up on his neck and arms. The paramount minister had no wish to see it again, that pulse like a huge, diseased heart beating.

All around him, the rocky island swarmed with Xixian soldiers doing their best to ignore the ominous surroundings as they finished tying together the reed boats. Vash noted that he and the antipolemarch seemed to have correctly planned how many bundles of reeds the men would have to carry down from the surface, and he felt a moment’s relief before he realized how foolish that was: what difference did it make that Vash had done his duty, that the autarch could find no fault with his arrangements? In a moment, they might all be dead, or the autarch himself might gain the strength of Heaven. Either way, nothing would ever be the same again.

“Where is my trusted paramount minister?” the Golden One called. Vash felt his hackles rising again.

“Here, O Great Tent.” He hobbled across the sliding, rounded stones until he reached the place where Sulepis stood tall and slender in his golden armor, a glorious vision even in this inconstant light. “How may I serve you, Master?”