(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (62 page)

The guards shoved the prisoners to their knees. Vansen wallowed in drifts of stone dust, sneezing as it billowed up around him like smoke and Barrick collapsed beside him as though arrow-shot, scarcely stirring. Vansen nudged the youth, trying to see if he had been injured somehow, but with the heavy wooden shackles around his wrists he could not move much without falling over.

Remember what I said…

Even as Gyir’s words sounded in Ferras Vansen’s skull, guards and workers began to stir all over the room—for a moment he thought that they had also heard the fairy’s thoughts. Then he heard a thunderous, uneven rhythm like the pounding of a mighty drum. When he realized he was hearing footfalls, he knew why the guards, even those whom nature had made helplessly crooked, suddenly tried to straighten, and why all the kneeling slaves began to moan and shove their faces against the rough floor of the great cavern.

The demigod came through the door slowly, the chained heads that ornamented him swaying like seaweed in a tidal pool. As terrifying as Jikuyin was, for the first time Vansen could see something of his great age: the monster limped, leaning on a staff that was little more than a good-sized young tree stripped of its branches, and his great head lolled on his neck as though too heavy for him to hold completely upright. Still, as the ancient ogre looked around the chamber and bared his vast, broken teeth in a grin of ferocious satisfaction, Vansen felt his bladder loosen and his muscles go limp. The end had come, whatever Gyir might pretend. No one could fall into the hands of such a monstrous thing and live.

The other prisoners, many of them smeared with blood from their labors, struck their heads on the floor and wailed as the demigod approached. The awful, gigantic chamber, the hordes of shrieking creatures with bloody hands and filthy, despairing faces prostrating themselves before their giant lord—for a moment Vansen simply could not believe his eyes any longer: he had lost his wits, that was all it could be. His mind was regurgitating the worst tales the deacon in Little Stell had told to terrify Ferras Vansen and the other village children into serving the gods properly.

“Perin Skylord, clothed in light,”

Vansen murmured to himself,

“Guard us through the awesome night
Erivor, in silver mail
Smooth the seas on which we sail
Kernios, of death’s dark lands
Take us in your careful hands…”

But it was pointless trying to remember childhood prayers—what help could such things be now? What good would anything do? The huge shape that was Jikuyin, so massive that he crushed stones that a strong man couldn’t lift into powder beneath his feet, was limping toward them, each grating step like something as big as the world chewing, chewing, chewing…

Do not despair!
The words came sharp as a slap.

Vansen turned to see that Gyir was still upright, though his guards had prostrated themselves. Everything in the Storm Lantern’s featureless face showed in his eyes alone, wide with excitement and fear, but also hot with rage. Just beyond Gyir, Prince Barrick swayed as if in a high wind, scarcely able to balance even on his knees, his face a pale, sickly mask in the flickering light. For a moment Vansen could see the sister’s handsome features in the brother’s, and suddenly he felt his almost-forgotten promise stab at him like a dagger. He could not surrender while there was breath in him—he had an obligation. Despair was a luxury.

Prayers to the Trigon brothers seemed pointless on the very doorstep of the Earthfather’s house. Unbidden, another prayer wafted into his thoughts like a fleck of ash floating on an updraft, a gentler prayer to a gentler deity—an invocation of Zoria, Mistress of the Doves. But although his lips moved, he could not make his clenched throat pass the words.
Zoria, virgin daughter, give me…give to me…

A moment later the Zorian prayer, Zoria herself, even his own name, all blew out of Ferras Vansen’s mind like leaves in a freezing wind as Jikuyin stopped in front of them and leaned down. His face was so huge it seemed the cratered moon had dropped from the sky.

“A gift to you.”
The demigod’s voice shook Vansen’s bones; his breath smelled like the fumes from a smelter’s furnace, hot and metallic.
“You will witness my supreme moment—and even participate.”
The curtain of dangling heads swayed stared sightlessly, shriveled lips helplessly grinning.

I’ll be joining them soon,
Vansen thought. How would the gods judge him? He had done his best, but he had still failed.

Jikuyin’s great, bearded head swiveled to inspect Vansen and his companions, and Vansen had to look away—the god’s eye big as a cannonball, the power of that squinting, reddened stare, were simply too much to bear.
“Your blood will unseal Immon’s Gate,”
Jikuyin rumbled,
“open the way to the throne room of the Dirtlord himself, that piss-drinking King of Worms who took my eye. And when Earthstar is mine, when his great throne is mine, when I wear his mask of yellowed bone, then even if the gods find their way back I will be the greatest of their number!”

You are mad,
said Gyir wonderingly. Many in the room heard his silent words: a moan of fear rose up, as though the slaves who could understand him expected to share his punishment.

“There is no madness among gods!”
Jikuyin laughed.
“How will I be called mad when I can shape everything to my own thoughts? Soon the gate will open, the blood will flow, and then what I speak…will be.”

My blood will dry to powder, to choking dust, before I let you spill so much as a drop in pursuit of this madness.

Jikuyin reached out a giant hand, fingers spreading as though he would crush Gyir to jelly. Instead, he only flicked at him, knocking the Qar warrior into a mass of shrieking prisoners. After those who could escape had scrambled away, the Storm Lantern lay unmoving where he had fallen, his featureless face in the dust.

“Who said it was your blood I wanted, you little whelp of Breeze?”
Jikuyin laughed again, a booming roar of satisfaction that threatened to bring down the cavern roof. His hand reached out again, knocking Vansen to the ground, then it folded around Barrick, who let out a thin shriek of surprise and terror before the breath was squeezed out of him. Jikuyin dropped the limp prince among the guards.
“Him—the mortal child. I can smell the Fireflower in him. His blood will do nicely.”

Vansen struggled helplessly against the heavy shackles as the guards dragged Barrick toward the looming gate, but they were too tight to slip, too heavy to break. Ferras Vansen let out a howl of grief. Whatever happened, he would certainly die too, but the imminent death of the prince seemed a greater failure, a more horrifying finality.

Something grabbed at his arm. Vansen kicked out and one of the stinking, shaggy guards fell back, but got up immediately and came toward him again. Fighting the inevitable, Vansen managed to land another kick (to even less effect) before he saw that something was strange about the creature’s expression. The apelike face was slack, and the eyes wandered lazily, fixed on nothing, as though the guard were blind. It was also holding a key in its clumsy, clawed hand.

If they want me unshackled before they kill me then it only means I’ll take some of them with me. But why would they want to take that risk?
As the creature fumbled roughly with the shackles, he suddenly realized he had seen that befuddled expression before on the creatures Gyir had controlled. Vansen looked to the fairy. The Storm Lantern was staring up into nothingness, squinting so hard in concerntration that his eyes were little more than creases. Another guard stood behind Gyir, doing something with his bonds as well, but even if the fairy was controlling them both, time was running out.

The guards had dragged Prince Barrick to a spot just before the mighty doors which stretched above them higher and wider than the front of the great temple in Southmarch. Ueni’ssoh, the terrible, cadaverous gray man, walked slowly up to stand beside them and raised his skeletal hands in the air.

Vansen could understand every word, but the tongue was nothing he had ever heard before, as inhuman as the sawing of a cricket: the sound of the gray man’s fluid speech was in Vansen’s ears, all tick and slur, but the meaning was in his head.

The gray man’s voice now rose, or gained some other power, because it seemed to fill Ferras Vansen’s head like water poured splashing into a bowl, louder and louder until he could scarcely think, although the actual tones seemed as measured and unhurried as before. This was no song of Kerneia that he had ever heard, but Vansen thought he recognized a few words here and there, the ancient words of mourning his grandfather had sung at his grandmother’s grave in the hills, but the gray man’s terrible, flat voice made Ferras Vansen see pictures in his head that had nothing to do with his long-dead grandmother or his father’s burial plot. A crimson-lit world of scuttling shadows filled his thoughts, an end to all things so final and so terrible that it lay on his heart like an immense weight.

The fairy-spelled guard still scrabbled at his shackles. Vansen was not free yet—he could not let the voice overwhelm him. He could not fail.

“See now where the darkness twists in us like a river
It is time to get up and go to the land of the Red Sunlight
The land where the sun sets and does not rise.

“O Burned Foot, let us shelter in your hard folds of shadow
Where we can still see the dying sun until the last day.
Crowfather
Wearer of the Iron Gloves
Husband to the Knot that cannot be Untied
We are frightened, O King. Open the gate!”

At first, in his terror and confusion, Ferras Vansen thought the massive stone portal was beginning to fade, or to melt away like ice. But no, he realized a moment later, something much stranger was happening: the great doors were swinging inward into shadow, the darkness beyond so absolute that it could smother the stars themselves. Vansen’s heart quailed. His body felt suddenly boneless, limp as an empty sack.

Ferras Vansen, do not despair!
The words came like a whisper from the other side of the world, but they gave him back a little of himself. It was Gyir speaking, Gyir in his head, but only faintly. He could feel the fairy’s powers stretched to their utmost as they touched Vansen, Barrick, the guards working at their bonds, and many others Vansen could not even name—Gyir’s will spreading among them in an invisible spiderweb of influence, although the web quivered and sagged now, near its breaking-point. The Storm Lantern’s strength was astonishing, far beyond anything Vansen could have dreamed.

Fight!
Gyir demanded.
Fight for the boy—fight for your home! I need more time.

Time? Why? It did not seem as though even the fairy’s heroic efforts would make much difference. Whether they were shackled or not, the world was ending right now, here in the darkness beneath the ground. Whatever was behind that door would swallow them all…

But even now, when nothing mattered, Ferras Vansen could not forget his oath to Barrick’s sister. It was almost the only thing he
could
remember: his own name and history, all that had happened to him before this moment, were fading swiftly, swallowed in the gray man’s sonorous words.

“O Silver Beak, Send your flying ones before us
O Ravens’ Prince, Make a trail in the sky
Show us the way to the gate, the gate of your servant.”

The gray man’s incantation now filled the cavern like the noise of a rising storm, harsh and booming, but it was also as intimate as if he whispered in Vansen’s ear. Surely no human throat could sound like that…!

“The ocean of mud where the breathless sleep
Pass it by!
The dreaming tree that lifts mountains with its crushing roots
Pass it by!
The forest of the beating heart
Where the flutes of the lost play in the shadows beside the path
Pass it by!

The Storm of Tears
With rain that wounds the faces of pilgrims like arrows
Pass it by!”

The gate was completely open, a hole into absolute blackness, but a blackness that was still somehow, inexplicably
alive
—Vansen could almost hear it breathing, and his heart seemed to swell in his breast until he thought it would push up into his throat and choke off the last of his air.

“Skull Eater, destroy our enemies hiding beside the road;
Roots of the Immortal Pine, fill our nostrils so we do not smell demons!
Shepherd of the Mummies, lead us safely among the unquiet dead;
Black Bones, hold us tightly in the icy winds!
Cloak of Singing Dust, show us only to the stars!

The gray man gestured. Two huge, hairy guards pulled Barrick up onto his knees in front of Ueni’ssoh, who was still chanting, then one of them yanked Barrick’s head back so that the boy’s chin jutted out toward Vansen and the others watching. The other guard unsheathed a strange, terrible knife with a jagged blade half as wide as it was long, and set it almost tenderly against the white flesh of the prince’s throat. Frenzied, Vansentried to struggle to his feet, and just at that moment he felt the creature behind give a last wrench at the shackles and they tumbled off his arms. Knives of pain stabbed in his joints as he raised his arms and staggered toward Barrick and the guards.

“O Narrowing Way, open the gate!”

The chanting words of the Dreamless filled every part of the world, every part of Vansen’s thoughts. They were heavy as stones, dropping on him, crushing him—or was that the thunder of Jikuyin laughing? The prince, the guards, and the gray man were washed by torchlight but framed against absolute darkness as if the gods themselves had forgotten to provide a world for them to inhabit.