(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (46 page)

Beyond the doorway at the chamber’s far end, a more or less level track led away into darkness. Within a few hundred paces the track grew deep with dust and the wagon slowed, then stopped. The yellow fairy and several other prisoners stepped up and pushed until it the wheels came free and began to roll again. Another thumping crash shook the cavern—Vansen could not hear it so much as he could see the way it knocked the yellow fairy and everything around him off-kilter—and for a moment the eyes through which he was looking stared straight down into nothingness: on the left side the path dropped away and the shadows stretched so deep the torchlight could not find their ending.

The prisoners steered the heavy cart very slowly around a bend in the track, trying not to let themselves or the wagon get too near the edge. Even so, one small captive was caught between the front wheel and the edge of the track; with a scream Vansen could barely hear, although he knew it must be hideously shrill in the yellow fairy’s ears, the little creature was swept off into darkness. The rest of the prisoners stopped, frightened and miserable, but blows from the guards’ clubs quickly set them moving again.

After they had finally coaxed the wagon around the difficult bend, they found themselves face-to-face with more of the hairy beast-guards coming along the track toward them. This group had scarves wrapped around their faces so that only their tiny eyes could be seen, which made them even more ominously strange. These new ape-things did not like to see their way blocked by the cart, and pointed forked spears at the prisoners, gesturing and grunting angrily until the yellow fairy and his comrades shrank back against the cliff face and let the masked creatures shove by. When they were gone, the woodsprite and his fellow prisoners laboriously heaved the corpse-wagon into motion again.

The part of Vansen that still thought as Vansen had wondered why they should be traveling so far, and where the bodies were being taken. Now he learned. As the wagon creaked onward the light grew stronger: there was clearly some other source besides the torches high on the walls above the narrow path. Only another hundred yards or farther the path turned and then turned again. The light and the sickening smell bloomed, and those prisoners who still wore rags of clothing tried to cover noses and mouths. The yellow fairy could do nothing except spread his hand over his muzzle, squeezing the star-shaped protuberance closed like a parent wrapping his fist around a child’s hand. Even through the curious dislocation of Gyir’s spell, Vansen could smell rotting flesh—the true stench must have been almost beyond belief.

For a moment Vansen could feel not just the woodsprite’s dull horror, and his own, but a flare of despair and dread from Prince Barrick as well, as though the boy were standing just beside him, or even just
inside
him. Barrick was fighting to get away, somehow, pushing back from the scene that stretched before them in the billowing firelight. Vansen felt Gyir’s connection to them all grow thin.

No!
Gyir’s thoughts came like hammer blows.
Do not turn away! Wait!

Dozens of guards, many in sacklike hooded robes that covered them almost entirely, swarmed along the floor of the vast cavern, which was little more than a shelf around a huge, open pit full of corpses, thousands of dead creatures of all kinds and sizes. Dirt brought in on ore carts by other guards was being shoveled in on top of the uppermost bodies. Fires burned everywhere, great bonfires at each corner of the huge hole and smaller fires tended by the guards in several of the wider places on the shelf around the pit, meant to disperse or consume the stench. The smoke and sparks swirled upward, and the heat of the fires and the air drawn in from the corridors that emptied into the pit chamber on all sides made the stinking winds rush in circles around the cavern before at last rising upward into the darkness of the cavern’s roof.

No. So many…! It is…

Vansen did not know if the thoughts were his own now or Barrick’s, or perhaps even Gyir’s. All he knew was that the terrible sight blurred before him as if his eyes were filling with tears, then it all flew away into darkness and he was back in his own frail body once more, sprawled on the floor of the cell beside Gyir and Barrick, weak, ill, and horror-stricken.

P
INIMMON VASH, THE PARAMOUNT MINISTER of Xis and its possessions all across Xand, looked at his closet with disaffection. Three boys, naked except for artful decorations of gold around their necks and ankles, cringed on the carpet. The slaves knew what it meant when their master was in an unhappy mood.

“I do not see my silk robe with my family nightingale crest. It should be in the closet. That robe is worth more than your entire families to the seventh generation. Where is it?”

“You sent it to be cleaned, Master,” one of the slaves ventured after a long silence.

“I sent it to be cleaned and brought back. It has not been brought back. I am going on a voyage. I must have my nightingale robe.”

Vash was just debating which one of them to beat, and if he had time to beat two, when the messenger came. It was one of the Leopards, dressed in the full panoply of warfare and very conscious of the days of fire and blood just ahead. The soldier stood straight as a broomstraw in the doorway, touched his palm to his forehead in salute, and announced, “Our lord Sulepis, the Master of the Great Tent, requires your immediate attendance.”

Pinimmon Vash carefully hid his irritation: it was not wise in these days of universal upheaval to give anyone even the slightest thing to mention to an ambitious courtier or (might all gods forbid it!) the autarch himself. Still, it
was
annoying. He could not imagine when he would find the time before leaving to give these boys the discipline they deserved, and even his large shipboard cabin was a place of little privacy. Nothing to be done, though. The autarch had called.

“I come,” he said simply. The Leopard guard turned smartly on his heel and strode out of the room. Vash paused in the doorway.

“I will be back very soon,” he told his servants. “If the nightingale robe is not in the closet, all of you will go up the gangplank limping and weeping. If the robe is not in excellently clean condition, I will be taking other servants on my voyage. You three will be floating down the canal past your parents’ houses, but they will not recognize you to weep over you.”

The look on their faces was almost worth the tedium of having to go and listen to the ravings of his mad and extremely demanding monarch. Vash was an old man and he enjoyed the few simple pleasures left to him.

The autarch was being bathed in a room filled with hundreds of candles. Vash was all too used to seeing his master naked, but he had never quite grown unused to it. It was not because the autarch’s nakedness was an ugly thing, not at all: Sulepis was a young man, tall and fit, if a trifle too slender for Vash’s taste (which tended toward round cheeks and small, childlike bellies). No, it was that his nakedness, which should have provoked thoughts of vulnerability or intimacy, seemed…unimportant. As though Sulepis wore a body only because it was convenient, or demanded by his station, but really would have been just as comfortable with nothing more than a skeleton or skinless meat or the stone limbs of a statue. The autarch’s nakedness, Vash had decided, had nothing much of the human about it. He never felt even a twinge of desire, shame, or disgust looking at the autarch, when any other unclothed man or woman would summon one of those feelings, if not all.

“You called for me, Golden One?”

The autarch stared at him for a long moment, as though he had never seen his paramount minister before—as if Pinimmon Vash were some stranger who had wandered into the monarch’s bath chamber. The candle-light rippled across the monarch as though his long body was something drifting at the bottom of the Eminent Canal. “Ah,” he said at last. “Vash. Yes.” He gestured limply toward a figure on his other side, half obscured by the steam of the huge bath. “Vash, you must greet Prusus, your scotarch.”

Vash turned to the crippled creature, who swayed in his litter as though caught in a high wind. Many thought he was simpleminded, but Pinimmon Vash doubted it. “A pleasure, Scotarch, as always. I hope I find you well?”

Prusus tried to say something, grimaced, then tried again. His round face contorted as though he were in agony—speaking was hard for him at the best of times, and even more difficult in front of the autarch—but he only got out a few grunting syllables before Sulepis laughed and waved his hand.

“Enough, enough—we cannot wait all day. Tell me, Prusus, how do you pray? Even Nushash must lose patience with your jerking and mumbling. Ah, and our other guest, Polemarch Johar. Vash, you and Johar already know each other, yes?”

Vash bowed slightly to the spare, cold-eyed man, as almost to an equal. Ikelis Johar, high polemarch of the autarch’s troops, was a power unto himself and although he and Vash had not yet clashed over policy, it was inevitable that one day they would. It was equally inevitable that one of them would not survive the clash. Looking at Ikelis Johar’s cruel, humorless mouth, Vash found himself looking forward to that day. One could have too much leisure, after all. “Of course, Golden One. The Overseer of the Armies and I are old friends.”

Johar’s grin was as humorless as that of a lion sniffing the breeze. “Yes—old friends.”

“Johar is in a cheerful mood—aren’t you, Overseer?” said the autarch, stretching his arms so a slave could oil them. “Because soon he will have a chance to give his men some exercise. Life has been dull the last few moons, since Mihan capitulated.”

“With all respect, Golden One,” Johar said, “I’m not certain I’d call besieging Hierosol merely exercise. It has never fallen by force in all its long history.”

“Then your name will live in glory beside mine, Overseer.”

“As you say, of course, and I am grateful to hear it. The Master of the Great Tent is never wrong.”

“That’s true, you know.” The autarch sat up as if struck with a sudden and pleasing thought; one of his slaves, trying desperately to avoid an incorrect contact with his master, almost slipped and fell on the wet floor. “It is the god in me, of course—the blood of Nushash himself running through me. I cannot be wrong and I cannot fail.” He sat back just as suddenly as he had risen, making the water rush back and forth in waves from one end of the large tub to the other. “A very comforting thing.”

But if that is so, my very great lord,
Pinimmon Vash could not help thinking,
it did not save your brothers, who also had the blood of the god in them, from losing a great deal of that holy blood when you took the throne.
This thought naturally stayed private, but he could not avoid a pang of fright when the autarch looked at him and smiled with wicked amusement, as if he knew just what heretical ideas his paramount minister was harboring.

“Come, there is much to do—even for one like me who cannot make mistakes, eh, Vash? Someone take the scotarch to his chambers. Yes, farewell, Prusus. No, save your breath. We all must prepare for the ceremonies of departure, the consecration of the army, and everything else.” The autarch’s smile twisted. “I need my most loyal servant at my side. Will you stay with me while the slaves dress me?”

The old minister bowed. “Of course, Golden One.”

“Good. And you, Johar, doubtless have many details to see to. We depart at dawn.”

“Of course, Golden One.”

The autarch smiled. “Two strong men but the same obedient words. The harmony of infallibility. What a beautiful, melodious world this is, my dearly beloved servants. How could it be better?” The autarch laughed, but with an odd harshness, as though he fought some kind of doubt. But the autarch never doubted, Vash knew, and the autarch feared nothing. In all the years he had known Sulepis, from his silent, studious childhood to his sudden and violent ascension to the throne, Pinimmon Vash had never seen the autarch anything other than confident almost to the point of madness.

“It is a beautiful world indeed, Golden One,” Vash said in the silence after the laughter, and despite the sudden chill that squeezed his heart he did his very, very best to sound as though he meant it.

She walked right out the door and no one stopped her. One moment all was light and warmth and the reassuring sound of her brothers and sisters breathing in their sleep, the next moment Qinnitan had stepped into the sudden, surprising cold of a night with no moon.

The houses and shops of Cat’s Eye Street were only shadow-shapes, but it didn’t matter. She knew the place as well as she knew the geography of her own body, knew that Arjamele’s doorway would be just
here,
and the loose stone of the next doorway along would catch her toe if she didn’t step over it. She knew the shape of everything, but she also knew that something was different—something in the dark, cold street had changed.

The well. The lid was off the well.

But that was impossible: the well was always covered at night. Still, even though she could not see it—could see almost nothing but the indistinct shapes of the buildings looming around her, black against the deep velvety purple of the sky—she knew it was uncovered. She could feel it like a hole in the night, a deeper black than anything she could see with her eyes. And worse, she could feel something in it—something
waiting
.

Still moving helplessly as though led by some god, she walked forward, feeling her bare soles against the gritty sand. The stones of her street, a street almost as old as Xis itself, had long since surrendered to the flowing sands which got into everything. No matter how hard the women of Cat’s Eye Street swept, the stones would never be seen again. But it was said that some of the oldest houses had cellar rooms with doors that had once let out onto this very street when the stones had still been visible, although now those doors could no longer be opened, and would admit only centuried dust if they were.

Qinnitan felt the well before she saw it, the waist-high ring of stone with emptiness at its center like an untended wound. She thought she could hear a faint noise as of something in the depths gently pushing the water to and fro.

She leaned forward, although she did not want to, although every sense she had screamed out for her to turn back toward the house and the safety of her sleeping family. Still she leaned farther, until her face was over the invisible hole, until the faint noises were rising straight up to her ears—
slish, splush, slish,
something gently stirring down in the darkness.

Was it a monstrous eight-legger such as she had seen in the market, a sort of wet sea spider with limbs as slippery and loose as noodles? But how could such a thing get into the well? Still, whatever it was, she could feel it as well as hear it, sense its inhuman presence somewhere below her.

Now she could feel it moving. Coming upward. Climbing, with inhuman strength and patience, up the smooth, clammy stones, climbing right up toward her where she leaned helplessly over the well mouth, her limbs stiff as stone. She could feel it in her head as well—cold thoughts, alien wishes unclear but unmistakable as fingers around her throat. It was climbing toward her as intently as if she had called it…

“Briony! Help me!”

At first she thought the startling voice came from the thing in the well, but it sounded like a real person—a young man, frightened as she was frightened. Was someone calling her? But why call her by that unfamiliar name?

The thing in the well did not stop or even slow the sticky slap of its climb. Qinnitan tried to scream, but could not. She tried again, but the scream could only build and build inside her until it seemed she would burst like a flooded dam.

“Briony! I’m here!”

She could feel him, as if he stood just on the other side of the well—could almost see him, a pale, pale boy with hair as flame-red as the streak in her own dark locks, a boy staring at her without seeing, his eyes haunted…

“Briony!”

She was terrified. The thing’s wet fingers were curling on the lip of the well and the boy couldn’t even see it? She wanted to know why he called her by that strange name, but instead when she found her voice at last she heard herself ask him,
“Why are you in my dreams?”

And then the blackness burst up from below and the boy blew away like smoke and the shriek at last came rushing out of her, rising, ragged….

Qinnitan sat up, gasping. Something had a grip on her and for a moment she struggled fruitlessly against it until she realized it was not huge and chilly but small and warm and…and frightened. It was Pigeon. Pigeon was hanging onto her, grunting with fear. He was terrified, but he was trying to comfort
her
.

“Don’t worry,” she said quietly. She found his head in the darkness, stroked his hair. He clung to her like a street musician’s monkey. “It was just a bad dream. Were you frightened? Did you call me?”

But of course he couldn’t have called her—not in words. The voice had been a dream, too.
Briony.
What a strange name. And what a terrible dream! It had been like the nights when she had lived in the Seclusion, when the priest Panhyssir had given her that dreadful elixir called the Sun’s Blood, that poison which had left her feverish and terrified that it was stealing her mind.

Remembering, Qinnitan shivered helplessly. Pigeon was already asleep again, his bony little body pressed against her so that she couldn’t lower her arm, which was already beginning to ache a little. How could she have believed that the autarch would simply let her go? She was a fool to linger here in Hierosol, only a short distance across the sea from Xis itself. She should pack up in the morning, leave the citadel and its laundry behind.

As she lay cradling the boy in the darkness, she heard something moaning: outside the dormitory, the winds were rising.

A storm,
she thought.
Wind from the south. What do they call it here? “Red wind”—the wind from Xand. From Xis…

She rolled over, gently dislodging Pigeon. His breathing changed, then settled into a low buzz again, soothing as the drone of the sacred bees, but Qinnitan could not be so easily calmed.
Winds push ships,
she thought. Suddenly, sleep seemed farther away than the southern continent.