Shadowplay by Tad Williams
Ueni’ssoh glided toward him and Barrick stumbled to his feet, but three more guards had fallen in behind the Dreamless, two of them armed with jagged-bladed axes, and he knew it was only a matter of moments until they would have him bleeding like a hung pig all over the threshold of the god’s gate. But his shackles were gone, he realized in wonder: somehow Vansen had struck them off before the darkness took him.
Down! The warning in his head seemed so close, so powerful, that for an instant he thought it must be the voice of the demigod himself pounding in his skull. Get down! Now!
Barrick looked around in confusion. Gyir was free of his shackles, too. The fairy-warrior stood on the top of a small rise of stone with half a dozen dead guards sprawled at his feet and something burning brightly in his hand—a flaming skull .. . ?
If you want to live another moment, boy, the fairy’s voice trumpeted through his thoughts, THEN LIE DOWN!
Barrick threw himself toward the ground even as Gyir’s arm swept forward and what seemed a tiny comet hurtled across the cavern. For a moment everything seemed to stop—the faces of guards and prisoners lifted and turned like sunflowers as they followed the path of the blazing thing—then a blast of heat and light crashed across the cavern and rolled Barrick violently before dropping him again. He lay in a vibrating silence, unable to get up, as if lightning had struck only a short distance away.
The rush of ideas into his head was so violent that at first Barrick could make no sense of the demigod’s angry burst of words and thoughts—he felt only a huge hammer of noise pounding at his ears and mind until he felt sure his head would collapse like an eggshell.
“... HOW DID THAT MONGREL CREATURE, THAT FACELESS SLUG, GET HIS HANDS ON MY PRECIOUS FIREPOWDER . . . ?”
Stunned and limp, Barrick thought it might be easiest simply to lie here on his back and let the world end, but a small, nagging voice in the back of his mind kept suggesting that perhaps a prince should meet his death sitting up. He rolled over, trying to get his legs under him.
Another thunderous crack, farther away this time and followed not. by ringing silence but by hoarse screams, proved that at least there was still sound and direction and distance. Barrick sat up and brushed something wet off his arm—a rag of bloody skin, but not his own. The rest of the shaggy guard and his two companions, victims of the first of the flaming things Gyir had thrown, were scattered across several yards of cavern floor. Even in such chaos, Barrick was glad the lights were dim: it was madly strange to see things that were so small and yet obviously part of a person who had been alive only moments before.
Gyir, who had been surrounded by guards and prisoners, now stood alone in a widening circle as creatures scrambled away from him in all directions. The fairy held a dirt-smeared death’s head in each hand, and Barrick wondered what strange magic the faceless warrior had summoned.
Get up and run, Barrick Eddon. Gyir’s words echoed in his head and he clambered to his feet almost without realizing. I will keep them back as long as my fireballs last.
Barrick could not frame the words, but Gyir must have sensed his confusion.
Exploding devices. I had those I could command pack skulls with gun-flour, seal them with mud, and leave them here for me. This way Jikuyin’s victims will get at least a little revenge! Gyir’s thoughts billowed like windblown flame—he was laughing! For the first time Barrick could feel that the fairy had truly been raised in battle, that it was his element in a way it would never be Barrick’s. Now go, while I hold them at bay! Strike for the surface!
But Vansen . . . !
Is gone, likely dead. All that is certain is that he is lost to us now. You must go. Do you yet have the thing I gave you?
Barrick had forgotten the mirror. His hand crept to his shirt. Yes.
Think of it no more. Flee! I will do what I can here.
But you have to come with me ... /
It is more important that at least one of us escapes, Barrick Eddon. Take it to the king in the House of the People. Now go.
But ... !
“ENOUGH!” The demigod Jikuyin rose up above a screeching herd of prisoners with flames running in their fur or their ragged clothes. The ogre seemed to grow like a ship’s bellying sail until his head threatened to bump the roof of the cavern. “YOU HAVE WASTED ENOUGH OF MY TIME, STORM LANTERN. THE DOOR TO THE EARTHLORD’S HOME IS
OPEN NO LAW, NOT EVEN THE BOOK of THE FIRE OF THE VOID ITSELF, SAYS I CANNOT SEAL THE CHARM BY SQUEEZ-ING THE BLOOD OUT OF THIS MORTAL CHILD LIKE WATER FROM A BAG OF WHEY! “Jikuyin took a stride toward Barrick, but Gyir bent and lit another muddied skull from the torch by his feet, then straight ened and flung the fizzing, sparking ball toward the towering shape. It spat a great gout of fire and hot air as it flared at the giant’s feet and knocked him staggering, but it flung Barrick back onto his knees as well.
Run, said Gyir in a small, insistent voice, and then he lit two more skulls and flung them at Jikuyin. Before they had even struck, the fairy was running toward the roaring demigod with a spear he must have taken from one of the guards. Then the giant and Gyir both disappeared in the double-crash of light and sound: Barrick could feel the skin on his cheeks blistering in the heat.
Barrick got up again, dizzy, with head throbbing and eyes blurred by stinging tears. He was almost blind, anyway—the cavern was full of billowing dust. He stumbled toward what he hoped was the way out, stepping over bodies that squirmed slowly, like dying insects. One of the hairy guards, its face nearly burned away, clutched weakly at his shin with charred fingers. Barrick crushed the creature’s skull with his booted foot, then pulled an ax out of its clawed grip, a weapon he could wield with his one good hand. He half climbed, half stumbled up the slope toward the doorway leading out of the great cavern. All the other prisoners and guards who could do so seemed to have fled through it already: nothing blocked his way but corpses and whimpering near-corpses.
When he reached the opening, Barrick turned back to see the demigod Jikuyin outlined by the flames in which he stood, grinning and roaring so that his cracked face seemed about to split open, with Gyir clutched in his great hand. The fairy, who should have been crushed by that awesome grip, instead stabbed and stabbed at the giant’s chest with his spear, each thrust followed by a spurt of black blood, each spurt only seeming to make Jikuyin laugh louder.
“YOU CANNOT HURT ME!” the giant shouted. “THE ICHOR OF SVEROS HIMSELF RUNS IN MY VEINS! I COULD DROWNYOUR ENTIRE RACE IN MY BLOOD AND STILL SURVIVE!”
Gyir jabbed silently, not just at Jikuyin s chest and face, but at his massive hand, too, struggling to keep the giant from throttling out his life.
“I WILL FIND YOUR LITTLE SUNLANDER BOY LIKE A CAT
FiNDS A LIMPING MOUSe,” Jikuyin chortled. “THEN 1 WILL RIDE HIS BLOOD TO THE VERY SEAT OF THE GODS!”
Barrick knew he should run—should take advantage of Gyir’s sacrifice, however hopeless—but now something new distracted him. The light of a torch had bloomed in the cavern’s entrance. Several Drows, the twisted creatures that looked like Funderlings, had pushed a huge corpse-wagon into the cavern doorway. This one was not loaded with the bodies of dead prisoners but with barrels, and the barrels were surrounded by dry straw.
A bearded Drow sat atop the barrels. He seemed oblivious to the bizarre, apocalyptic events in the cavern below him, his eyes fixed instead on something in the middle of the air. He might have been an old man beside a busy road, content to wait until his passage would be perfectly safe.
AND WHEN I HAVE THE EARTHLORD’S POWER,” Jikuyin was gloating, oblivious to the thick, shining blood that oozed down his front, heedless of the dozen new wounds on his face and neck, “I WILL PAINT YOUR PEOPLE’S EPITAPH WITH THE JUICES I WRING FROM YOUR CORPSES! AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT EPITAPH WILL BE?”
I know what yours will be. Gyir’s thought was so quiet that Barrick could barely understand it, although he stood only a few dozen yards away. It will be, “He was not good at thinking ahead.”
&n
The driver atop the wagon full of barrels raised the torch and waved it. The little men massed behind him shoved the cart out onto the downslope.
As the cart picked up speed, bouncing down the track faster than a horse could run, the driver made no attempt to dismount. Instead he dropped the torch into the straw piled around his feet. The flames flared high around the barrels, so that within a few more moments a great billowing blaze surrounded the little man and filled the back of the wagon. At the base of the track the unheeding giant still tore blindly at the small shape on his back, the faceless gnat who so annoyingly refused to die.
Jikuyin finally yanked Gyir free, pulling the fairy’s arm loose in its socket so that it dangled helplessly and the spear dropped from his nerveless lin gers. As Jikuyin bellowed in triumph, ignoring the wagon, Barrick realized what was in the barrels.
“I WILL EAT YOU, INSECT!” the demigod roared.
You will choke on me. The skin of Gyir’s outer face had been torn away, and his strange small mouth twisted in what might have been a bloody smile. Look.
For the merest instant Barrick saw Jikuyin s face and the way it changed, then the blazing cart crashed into the demigod and the entire cavern vanished in a howling, crackling storm of fire. Barrick felt the Storm Lantern’s last thought, a joyous curse on his defeated enemy, then the prince was flung away up the slope, skidding and rolling, and he felt the fairy’s presence in his thoughts wink out like a snuffed candle.
Barrick came to a stop in the doorway amid the shrieking Drows who had brought the wagon, awakened by Gyir’s death into this incomprehensible chaos. The stupefying concussion of the gun-flour, still echoing, was followed a moment later by the cracking, scraping sound of the cavern’s stone roof collapsing. Solid rock jumped and boomed like Heaven’s own drums. Several of the creatures who had unwittingly engineered this monstrous event scrambled over Barrick like rats in their haste to flee the doomed cavern. The prince could only cover his head and hold his breath as the impacts lifted and dropped him.
A millionweight of stone came tumbling down, burying demigod and mortals alike, sealing the open gateway to the gods’ realm for the next thousand years and more.
38. Beneath the Burning Eye
Even the gods weep when they speak of the Theomachy, the war between the clan of the three heavenly brothers and the dark clan of
Zmeos the Horned One. Many of the brightest fell, and their like will never be seen again, but their deeds live on, that men may understand honor and proper love of the gods.
—from The Beginnings of Things The Book of the Trigon
PELAYA HAD NEVER SEEN anything like it. Even in her worst childhood nightmares, chased by some hungry monster like Brabi-nayos Boots-of-Stone out of her nurse’s stories, she had not felt a terror and hopelessness like this.
The sky above Hierosol was black as if with a terrible storm, but it was smoke, not clouds, that had hidden the sun for three days now. On either side of the citadel much of the Crab Bay and Fountain districts were in flame. Pelaya could see the flames in particularly bright relief from the window of the family house near Landsman’s Market, a horrible and fascinating sight, as if beautiful, glowing flowers were sprouting all across the city. In the districts along the seawalls the sickly smoke of the sulfur rafts had crept over the houses in a poisonous yellow fog. She had heard her father telling one of the servants that the autarch’s burning sulfur had emptied most of the Nektarian Harbor district, that even the seaport end of the Lantern Broad was as silent as a tomb but for hurrying files of soldiers mov—
ing from one endangered part of the wall to another. Surely this must be the end of the world—the sort of thing the ragged would-be prophets in the smaller church squares were always shrieking about. Who could have guessed that those dirty, smelly men would be right after all?
“Come away from there, Pelaya!” her sister Teloni cried. “You will let in the poison smoke and kill us all!”
Startled, she let the window shutter go, almost losing her fingers as it crashed down. She turned in fury but the angry reply never came out of her mouth. Teloni looked helpless and terrified, her face was as white as one of the family’s ancestor masks.
“The smoke is far away, down by the sea walls,” Pelaya told her, “and the wind is pushing the other direction. We are in no danger from the poison.”
“Then why are you looking? Why do you want to see ... that?” Her sister pointed at the shutter as though what lay beyond were nothing but some unfortunate person—a deformed tramp, perhaps, or some other grotesque who could be ignored until he gave up and went away again.
“Because we are at war!” Pelaya could not understand her sister or her mother. They both skulked about the house as though this astonishing, dreadful thing was not happening. At least little Kiril was waving his wooden sword, pretending to slaughter Xixian soldiers. “Do you not care?”
“Of course we care.” Teloni’s eyes tilled with tears. “But there is nothing we can do about it. What good does it do to . . . to stare at it?”
Pelaya got her shoulder against the shutter and lifted it again, pushing so hard that she almost fell out as it began to open. Teloni gasped and Pelaya felt her own heart speed—the cobbled courtyard was three floors below, quite far enough to break her bones.
Her sister grabbed Pelaya’s arm. “Be careful!”
“I’m fine, Teli. Look, come here, I’ll show you what Babba’s doing.”
“You don’t know. You’re just a girl—you’re younger than me!”
“Yes, but I pay attention when he talks.” She got the shutter all the way open and propped it with the thick wooden rod so she’d have her hand free to point. “There, by the Gate of the Fountain, do you see? That’s the place where the autarch’s cannons are trying to knock down the wall, but Babba is too clever. As soon as he realized what they were doing, he sent men to build a new wall behind it.”
“A new wall? But they’ll just knock that down too, won’t they?”
“Perhaps. But by the time they do, he’ll have built another . . . and another . . . and so on. He will not let them break through.”
“Truly?” Teloni looked a little relieved. “But won’t they dig under the wall? I heard Kiril say the autarch’s men would dig tunnels under the walls here by Memnos or Salamander where there’s no ocean—that they could come up in our garden if they wanted to!”
Pelaya rolled her eyes. “You don’t listen to me, but you listen to Kiril? By all the gods, Teli, he’s only seven years old.”
“But isn’t what he says true?”
“Do you see those?” She pointed to the strange shape by the nearest section of the citadel wall. “That’s a sling engine—a kind of stone-throwing machine. It throws stones almost as heavy as the ones that come out of the autarch’s big cannon. Whenever Babba and his men see someone digging a tunnel, they throw big stones at them and crush it.”
“With the autarch’s soldiers still inside?”
Pelaya snorted. Was she going to weep about the enemy who was trying to kill them? “Of course.”
“Good. I’m glad.” Teloni stared, eyes wide. “How do you know these things, Pelaya?”
“I told you—I listen. And speaking of listening, that’s how they find the tunnels if they ever come close to the walls. Or they use the peas.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Dried peas. Papa and his men dig special drums into the ground all alo
“But they have so many soldiers!”
“It does not matter. We have our walls. Hierosol has never been conquered by force—that’s what Babba says. Even Ludis Drakava could never have taken the citadel if the old emperor had an heir. Everyone knows that. The Council of Twenty-Seven was afraid of the autarch, so they opened the gates to Drakava instead.”
“What if they do that for the autarch now? What if he offers them some bargain to let him in?”
Pelaya shook her head. “The council may be cruel old men, but they aren’t fools. The autarch never keeps promises. He would execute them all and chew on their bones.” Her childhood dreams abruptly came back to her again—the giant Boots-of-Stone with blood spattered in his beard, his jaws grinding and grinding. It didn’t matter what she told her sister, the world was still going to end. She freed the wooden rod and let the window shutter down. “Let’s go help Mama. I don’t want to look anymore.”