Shadowrise (4 page)

“ ‘
I remember how you spit on my father’s corpse,’ Crooked said to Old Age, then lifted up his hand of bronze and his hand of ivory and shoved the ancient one in the back. Old Age stumbled forward and fell against Wisdom, who fell against Huntsman, and soon all those who had come from all over the palace to save their lord fell into the the land of Emptiness together. That broke Sky Man’s grip and they all tumbled into the cold darkness forever, every last one.

“
Crooked laughed to see them fall, laughed as they shouted and cursed, laughed hardest when they were gone. He had brooded long on the evil they had done him and he felt no pity.

“
One of Sky Man’s kin, though, had not come into the chamber to help his lord. That was Tricker, who never did anything he could let others do. When he saw what had happened, how Sky Man, the strongest of all the gods had been bested and banished, Tricker was afraid. He ran down from the palace of the gods to warn his father, Stone Man.

“
So it was that when Crooked at last came down from the great mountain Xandos and ran toward the house of Stone Man, swift Tricker had run before him. Crooked had no surprise to help him, so when he reached the great gates of Stone

“ ‘
I tried to save your mother,’ Tricker whined. ‘I tried to help her escape. And I have always been your friend! When all the others were against you, I spoke for you. When they cast you out, did I not take you in and give you wine?’

“
Crooked laughed. ‘You wanted my mother for yourself and would have had her if she had not escaped. You did not speak for me, you took no side—that is always your way, so that you can ally yourself with whoever wins. And you took me in and gave me wine to make me drunk, so that you would learn from me how to make the magical things I gave to Sky Man and the others, but my ivory hand protected me by breaking the cup, and so you failed.’ He lifted Tricker up by the neck and carried him into Stone Man’s chamber. Crooked was still afraid of the lord of the dark earth, but he knew that one way or another the end was coming.

“
Stone Man Kernios trusted no one, so he had not drunk the potion Crooked’s mother had prepared for him. He stood ready now in his frightsome gray armor, his awful spear Earthstar in his hand. He was in the greatness of his strength and in his own palace. But he had one other weapon, too, and when Crooked entered by the roads of Emptiness, appearing from the air in front of him, Stone Man showed that weapon to him.

“
Crooked did not move. ‘Your brothers have been shown more mercy than they showed my kin. They are not dead, but only sleeping in cold, empty lands, as you soon will, too.’

“
Stone Man laughed. They say it were like a wind from a tomb. ‘How is that better than death? Sleeping forever in emptiness? Well, you shall have no such gift, as you deem it. You will destroy yourself or your mother will bleed out her life, then I will kill you anyway.’

“
Crooked lifted up Tricker, still choking in the grip of his bronze hand. ‘And what about your son?’

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Stone Man’s voice was the unkind rumble of the earth shaking. ‘I have had many sons. If I survive I can make many more. If I do not, I care not what survives me. Do what you will.’

“
Stone Man did not wait. Even as Crooked stared at his mother gasping out her life on the floor, the lord of the black earth flung his great spear, still wet with his mother’s lifeblood, at Crooked’s heart. Crooked tried to make Earthstar obey him but Stone Man had laid his own words of power upon it and Crooked could not bend it to his mastery. Crooked only had time to step sideways into the empty lands. The spear flew past him and struck the wall so hard half the palace fell down and all the lands around shook and quivered.

“
When Crooked stepped back out the roads of Emptiness, Stone Man was on him. They wrestled then for a long time as the palace itself fell around them, their strength so great and their contending so mighty that the very stones of the earth were all broken and crushed, so that what had once been a rocky fastness of peaks above Stone Man’s house fell down into dust, and the land sunk, and the ocean rushed in all around them, so at last they were fighting on an island of stone amid the waters.

“
At last the two of them caught at each other’s throats. Stone Man was the stronger, and Crooked could only step into the ways of darkness, but Stone Man held on and was carried with him. As they fell through emptiness, Stone Man bent Crooked’s back until it was nearly breaking. Crooked could not draw another breath, and neither could he think as Stone Man crushed out his life.

“ ‘
Now look into my eyes,’ Stone Man said. ‘You will see a darkness greater than anything Emptiness can make or even imagine.’

“
Crooked was almost caught, for if he had looked once into the eyes of the Lord of the Black Depths he would have been pulled down into death, but instead he turned his head away and sank his teeth into Stone Man’s hand. Stone Man was so pained that his grip loosened and Crooked was able to shake him off, then Stone Man fell away and away into the cloudy, cold dark.

“
Crooked wandered a while in the most distant lands of Emptiness, dizzy and confused, but at last found his way back to Stone Man’s house where his mother’s body lay. He kneeled over her but found he could not weep. Instead he touched his hand to the place she had kissed him, then bent and kissed her cold cheek.

“ ‘
I have destroyed your destroyers,’ he told her silent form.

“
Without warning, a terrible pain went through him as Stone Man’s great spear pierced his chest. Crooked staggered to his feet. Tricker stepped from the shadows where he had hidden. The mischief-maker laughed and capered.

“ ‘
And now I have destroyed you,’ Tricker Zosim cried. ‘All the great ones except for me are all dead, and I alone am left to rule all the world and the seven times seven mountains and seven times seven seas!’

“
Crooked grasped with his hand of bronze and his hand of ivory at the spear Earthstar that had stabbed him. The great weapon burst into flames and burned away to a cinder. ‘I am not destroyed,’ he said, although he was sorely wounded. ‘Not yet . . . not yet . . .’ ”

 

It was only when the pause had gone on so long that Barrick found himself nodding toward sleep that he finally looked up. “Bird? Skurn? What happened next?” His eyes widened. “Where are you?”

A few moments later a mostly black shape flapped down out of the perpetual gray sky with a horrid something wriggling in its black beak.

“Urm,” it said, while most of the legs were still hanging out, kicking in hopeless protest. “Lovely. Us’ll finish the tale later. Spotted a whole nest of ‘these, us has. Taste just like dead mouse ‘fore it bloats too far and bursts. Shall us fetch you one or two?”

“Oh, gods,” groaned Barrick as he turned away in disgust. “Wherever you are, alive or dead or sleeping, please give me strength.”

The raven sniffed at his foolishness. “Praying for strength be not enough. For us to stay strong, us has to eat.”

—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”

 

 

T
HE TEMPLE BELL WAS RINGING for midday prayers. Briony felt a clutch of shame—she was already an hour later than she had promised, in large part because of Lord Jino and his shrewd, seemingly endless questions.

“Please, my lord,” she told him as she rose to her feet. “I apologize, but I truly must go to see my friends.” So hard after months of rough living to get the knack of ladylike movement and speech once more—it felt at least as false as any part she’d played for the theater troupe. “I crave your pardon.”

“By friends, you mean the players?” Erasmias Jino cocked a stylishly plucked eyebrow. The Syannese lord looked like a fop, but that was only the Syannese style: Jino was renowned for his shrewdness and had also killed three men in duels decreed by the Court of Honor. “Surely, your Highness, you are not still pretending that such as you could truly be friends with . . . such as those. They enabled you to travel in secrecy—a clever stratagem when traveling through unsafe country on dangerous roads—but the time for that imposture is over.”

“Nevertheless, I must go to see them. It is my duty.” She had to admit that much of what he said was true. She hadn’t treated the players as true friends, but had kept all that was most important about herself a secret. They had opened their lives to her but Briony Eddon had not reciprocated, nor even come close: they had been honest, she had been the opposite.

Well, most of them had been honest. “I understand you have released all except Finn Teodoros. He claimed to bear messages for your king from Lord Brone. I am Avin Brone’s true monarch and he would not have them kept from me, I know. I would like to hear those messages.”

Jino smiled and brushed his fingers through his beard. “Perhaps you will, but that is for my master King Enander to decide, Princess Briony. He will see you later today.” The juxtaposition of titles was no accident: Jino was reminding her that she stood below the Syannese king in precedence, and would have even in her own country—but she was not, most definitely not, in her own country.

Lord Jino rose with a smooth grace most women would have envied. “Come. I will take you to the players now.”

Father gone, Kendrick gone, Barrick . . .
She fought to keep the tears that suddenly trembled on her lower lid from running over.
Shaso, and now Dawet. All gone, most of them dead—maybe all of them . . .
She tried to steady herself before the Syannese official noticed.
And now I must say goodbye to Makewell’s Men as well.
It was a strange feeling, this loneliness. Always before she had felt it as something temporary, as something that must be endured until her situation improved. For the first time she was beginning to sense that it might not be temporary at all, that she might have to learn live this way, tall and straight as a statue, hard as stone, but hollow inside.
All, all hollow . . .

Jino led her across the residence and then through one of Broadhall Palace’s great gardens and into a quiet hallway built along the inside of the palace’s great wall. Such a vast dwelling—the palace alone as large as all of Southmarch, castle and city. And she knew not a soul here, had no one to trust . . .

The Southmarch players were sitting on a bench in a windowless chamber under the eyes of several guards. Most of them already looked frightened; the sight of Briony, confirmed now as their ruler and dressed in expensive clothes Jino had provided for her, did not make them any less so. Estir Makewell, whose last words to Briony had been angry and unpleasant, even blanched and hunched her shoulders as though she expected to be struck. Of all the players on the bench, only young Feival did not look cowed. He eyed her up and down.

“Look at what they’ve got you up in!” he said approvingly. “But stand up straight, girl, and wear it as though you mean it!”

Briony smiled in spite of herself. “I’ve lost the knack, I guess.”

The reprobate Nevin Hewney was eyeing her as well, frowning in wonderment. “By the gods, they told the truth. To think—had I but tried a little harder, I could have knobbed a princess!”

Estir Makewell gasped. Her brother Pedder fell off the bench and two guards lowered their halberds in case this might be the start of some general uprising. “Blessed Zoria save us!” Estir cried hoarsely, staring at the fierce blades. “Hewney, you fool, you will have us all on the headsman’s block!”

Briony could not help being a little amused, but did not feel she could afford to show too much familiarity in front of the guards and Jino. “Be assured that should I take offense,” she said, “it is only Hewney who would pay the price for his ungovernable tongue.” She fixed the playwright with a stern gaze. “And were I to read out the bill of particulars against him I might start with the time he referred to myself and my brother as ‘twin whelps sired by Stupidity on the bitch Privilege.’ Or perhaps the time he referred to my imprisoned father as ‘Ludis Drakava’s royal bum-toy.’ I think either of those would suffice to put the headsman to work.”