(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (55 page)

How long was a sleep? How long was death? Vansen did not know how much time passed as he stood in amazement, too moonstruck even to hide, and watched the host pass. When it had gone, the road lay all but naked, clothed only in a few tatters of mist.

“We must . . . follow them,” Vansen said at last. It was hard, painfully hard, to find words and speak them. “They are going south. To the lands of men. We will follow them to the sun.”

“The lands of men will vanish.”

Vansen turned to see that Collum Dyer’s eyes were tightly closed, as though he had some memory locked behind his eyelids that he wished to save forever. The soldier was trembling in every limb and looked like a man cast down from the mountain of the gods, shattered but exultant.

“The sun will not return,” Dyer whispered. “The shadow is marching.”

21

The Potboy’s Dolphin

T
HERE WAS A TOWER in Qul-na-Qar whose name meant something like “Spirits of the Clouds” or “The Spirits in the Clouds,” or perhaps even “What the Clouds Think”—it was never easy to make mortal words do the dance of Qar thought—and it was there the blind king Ynnir went when he sought true quiet. It was a tall tower, although not the tallest in Qul-na-Qar: one other loomed above all the great castle like an upheld spear, a slender spike that was simply called “The High Place,” but its history was dark since the Screaming Years and even the Qar did not visit it much, or even look up at it through the fogs that usually surrounded their greatest house.

Ynnir din’at sen-Qin, Lord of Winds and Thought, sat in a simple chair before the window of one of Cloud-Spirit Tower’s two highest rooms. His tattered garments fluttered a little in the winds but he was otherwise motionless. It was a clear day, at least by the standards of Qul-na-Qar: although as always there was no sun visible in the gray sky, the afternoon’s sharp winds had chased away the mists: the slender figure who waited patiently in the chamber’s doorway for Ynnir to speak could see all the rooftops of the vast castle spread out below in a muted rainbow of different shades of black and deep gray, glittering darkly from the morning’s rains.

The one who waited was patient indeed: nearly an hour passed before the blind king at last stirred and turned his head. “Harsar? You should have spoken, old friend.”

“It is peaceful to look out the window.”

“It is.” Ynnir made a gesture, a complex movement of fingers that signified gratitude for small things. “All morning I listened to the anger of the Gathering, all that arguing about the Pact of the Glass, and thought about the time when I would come here, away from it all, and feel the breeze from M’aarenol on my face.” He lifted his fingers and touched them to his eyes once, twice, then a third time, all with the precision of ritual. “I still see what was outside it on the day I lost my sight.”

“It has not changed, Lord.”

“Everything has changed. But, come, you have waited for me patiently, Harsar-so. I do not believe the view alone has brought you here.”

Harsar inclined his hairless head ever so slightly. He was of the Stone Circle People, a small, nimble folk, but was tall for his kind: when Ynnir rose and Harsar stepped forward to help him, his head reached almost to the king’s shoulder. “I have good news, Lord.”

“Tell me.”

“Yasammez and her host have crossed the frontier.”

“So quickly?”

“She is very strong, that one. She has been waiting long years for this, preparing.”

“Yes, she has.” The king nodded slowly. “And the mantle?”

“She carries it with her, at least for now, but the scholars in the Deep Library think it will not sustain itself if stretched too far. But everywhere she has raided the mantle has spread, reclaiming that which is ours, and even when it will spread no farther, she will go on with fire and talon and blade.” Even patient Harsar could not keep his voice altogether even; a hint of exultation writhed in his words. “And everywhere she goes, the sunlanders will wail behind her, searching for their dead.”

“Yes.” Ynnir stood silent for a long time. “Yes. I thank you for these tidings, Harsar-so.”

“You do not seem as pleased as I would have thought, Lord.” The councillor was startled by his own words and lowered his head. “Ah, ah. Please forgive my discourtesy, Son of the First Stone. I am a fool.”

The king lifted a long-fingered hand, made a gesture that signaled “acceptable confusion.” “You have nothing to apologize for, friend. I simply have much to consider. Yasammez is a mighty weapon. Now that she has been loosed, all the world will change.” He turned his head toward the window once more. “Do me the favor of excusing me, Harsar-so. It was good of you to come so far to give me this news.” His long face was grave and still; a hovering mote of light like a pale lavender firefly had begun to flicker above his head. “I must think. I must . . . sleep.”

“Forgive me for imposing myself, great Ynnir. Will you permit one more unforgivable imposition? May I offer my company on your journey down to your chambers? The stairs are still damp.”

A tiny smile came to the blind king’s face. “You are kind, but I will sleep here.”

“Here?” There was only one couch in the Cloud-Spirit Tower and it was a place of power, of shaped and directed dreams. A moment later, the man of the Stone Circle People brought his hand to his mouth. “Forgive me, Lord! I do not mean to question you again. I am a fool today, a fool.”

This time Ynnir’s response was a degree or two closer to frost. “Do not distress yourself, Councillor. I will be well.”

Harsar bowed and bowed again, backing out of the room so quickly that an observer might have feared the councillor himself was in greater danger of tumbling down the long, steep stairwell than the blind king, but he spun neatly on his heel at the edge of the steps before starting his descent. Many of the towers of Qul-na-Qar had stairs that yielded quiet music, and of course the infamous steps of the High Place moaned softly, like children in troubled sleep, but the stairway of Cloud-Spirit Tower surrendered no noise except that of a visitor’s tread. Ynnir listened to his councillor’s velvet-soft footfalls grow fainter and fainter until he could no longer hear them above the skirling wind.

Ynnir din’at sen-Qin moved through a door in the wall that separated this highest place in the tower into two rooms. That other chamber, that twinned space, had its own window, facing not across the expanse of the castle and its countless rooftops glinting wet as beach stones but away into the misty south—toward the Shadowline and the great host of Lady Yasammez and the lands of mortals. Like the other room, it was sparsely furnished. That room had a chair: this one had a low bed. The king lay down on it, lavender light glittering above his brow, then folded his arms across his breast and began to dream.

Chert had barely slept at all. The long watches of the night had passed like guests who sensed they were unwelcome and were all the slower to leave because of it.

We’re caught up in bad things.
It was in his every thought. For the first time he understood what the big folk must mean when they asked him how he could stand to live in a cave under the ground. But it was not the stone of Funderling Town that oppressed him any more than a fish was oppressed by water; it was the feeling that he and his small family were surrounded and enwebbed by a faceless, invisible
something,
and it was precisely because he did not know what it was that he felt so miserable, so helpless.
We’re caught up in bad things and they’re getting worse
.

“What in the name of the Mysteries are you up to?” Opal’s voice was muzzy with sleep. “You’ve been twitching all night.”

He was tempted to tell her it was nothing, but despite their occasional squabbling, Chert was not one of those fellows who felt more comfortable in the company of other men than with his own wife. They had come far together and he knew he needed not only her comfort, but her good wits, too. “I can’t sleep, Opal. I’m worried.”

“What about?” She sat up and pushed at the strands of hair escaping from her nightcap. “And don’t talk so loud—you’ll wake the boy.”

“The boy is part of what worries me.” He got up, padded to the table, and picked up the jar of wine. Funderlings seldom used lamps in their own homes, making do with the dim, dim glow spilling in from the street lanterns, and found it amusing that the big folk couldn’t seem to blunder around aboveground without a blaze of light. He took a cup from the mantel shelf. “Do you want some wine?” he asked his wife.

“Why would I want wine at this hour?” But her voice was definitely as worried as his, now. “Chert, what’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure. Everything, really. The boy, those Rooftoppers, what Chaven said about the Shadowline.” He brought his cup of wine back to bed and slid his feet under the heavy quilt. “It wasn’t simply an accident that child appeared, Opal. That he was brought out of that place and dumped here on the very same day I find that the Shadowline has moved for the first time in years.”

“It’s not the boy’s fault!” she said, her voice rising despite her own injunction to quiet. “He’s done nothing wrong. Next you’re going to say he’s some kind of . . . spy, or demon, or . . . or a wizard in disguise!”

“I don’t know what he is. But I know that I’m not going to go another night wondering what’s in that bag around his neck.”

“Chert, you can’t. We have no right . . . !”

“That’s nonsense, woman, and you know it. This is our house. What if he brought home a poisonous snake—a fire-worm or somesuch? Would we have to let him keep it?”

“That’s just silly . . .”

“Well, it’s at least as silly when there are dangers all around, when the Twilight People may walk right out of the old stories and come knocking at our very doors, to pretend as though this was an ordinary time and ordinary circumstances. We found him, Opal, we didn’t birth him. We don’t know anything about who he is—or even
what
he is—except that he came from behind the Shadowline. You didn’t see the way those Rooftoppers treated him—like he was an old friend, an honored ally . . .”

“He helped one of them. You said so!”

“And he’s carrying something we haven’t looked at that might tell us about his past.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, and you don’t know that it doesn’t. Why are you fighting me, Opal? Are you so afraid we might lose him?”

There were tears in her eyes—he needed no light to know that: he could hear it in her voice. “Yes! Yes, I’m afraid we might lose him. And mostly because you wouldn’t care if we did!”

“What?”

“You heard me. You treat him well enough because you’re a kind man, but you don’t . . . you don’t . . . you don’t love him.” She was fighting to be able to speak now. “Not like I do.”

For a moment anger and astonishment ran together in him. She turned onto her side. Her sobs shook the mattress and something in the brokenhearted sound of it pushed everything else away. This was his Opal, weeping, terrified. He curled his arms around her.

“I’m sorry, my old darling. I’m sorry.” He heard himself saying it, regretted it even as the words left his mouth. “Don’t worry, I . . . I won’t let anyone take him from you.”

 

“Isn’t there any other way?” she asked. They had lit one of the smallest lamps; her face was red and her eyes swollen. “It seems a terrible thing to do—it seems wrong.”

“We are parents now,” Chert said. “I suspect we must get used to feeling terrible about some things we must do. I suspect it is the tunnel-toll for having a child.”

“That’s just like you,” she whispered, half angry, half not. “Anything you take up, you decide you know all about it. Just like with those racing moles.”

The sleeping boy, who as usual had kicked his blanket off, was lying belly-down, face turned to the side like a swimmer taking a breath, pale hair white as frost. Chert stared with a mixture of fondness and fear. He knew he had just signed a treaty of sorts, that in return for getting a look at the contents of the sack he had as good as promised that whatever they might be, he would abide by Opal’s judgment. And he knew in his heart that unless they found evidence that the child had actually committed murder—and not just any old murder, but something important and recent—she would not consider it grounds to send the boy away.

How did that happen so quickly?
Chert wondered.
Are all women like that—ready to love a child, any child, just as a hand is ready to grasp or an eye ready to see? Why don’t I feel the same way?
Because although he knew he truly did care for the child, there was nothing in him like the fierce possessiveness that his wife felt, the almost helpless need.
Does she burn too hot? Or is my heart too cold?