Shadowplay

  “Perin’s great hammer!” he whispered hoarsely. “What are all these horrors?”

  “Shadlowlanders,” Barrick told him, then, after cocking his head toward Gyir for a moment, “Slaves.”

  “Slaves to what? Who is this Jack Chain?”

  Gyir, who could understand Vansen even though he could not speak to him directly, bleakly spread his long-fingered hands as if trying to demonstrate something of improbable size and power, but then shook his head and let his hands drop.

  “A god, he calls him,” said the prince. “No, a god’s bastard. A bastard god.” Barrick let his head droop. “I do not know—I can’t remember everything he said. I’m tired.”

  They were shoved off to a place in the center of the camp by themselves, for which Vansen was as grateful as he could be under the circumstances, and where they huddled under a sky the color of wet stone. Vansen and Barrick sat close to each other on the damp, leaf-carpeted ground, for the warmth and—at least in Vansen’s case—the human companionship. The weird army of prisoners that surrounded them, dozens and dozens all told, seemed strangely quiet: only an occasional bleating noise or a spatter of unfamiliar, clicking speech broke the silence. Vansen could not help noticing that they behaved like animals who sensed that the hour for slaughter had come round.

  He leaned close to the prince’s ear. “We must escape, Highness. And when we do, we must try to make our way back to mortal men’s country again. If we stay any longer in this never-ending evening, surrounded by godless things like these, we shall go mad.”

  Barrick sighed. “You shall, perhaps. I think I went mad a long time ago, Captain.”

  “Don’t say such things, Highness .. .”

  “Please!” The prince turned on him, his weariness forgotten for a moment. “Spare me these ... pleasant little thoughts, Captain. ‘Should not...’—as though I might bring something bad down on myself. Look at me, Vansen! Why do you think I am here? Why do you think I came with the army in the first place? Because there is a canker in my brain and it is eating me alive!”

  “What .. . what do you mean?”

  “Never mind. It is not your fault. I could have wished you would have made a busybody of yourself somewhere else, though.” Barrick lifted his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them.

  “Do you know why I followed you, Highness?” The bleak surroundings seemed to be getting into Vansen’s blood and his thoughts like a cold fog. Soon I shall be as mournful and mad as this prince. “Because your sister asked me—no, begged me to do so. She begged me to keep you safe.”

  Now Barrick showed fire again. “What, does she think I am helpless? A child?”

  “No. She loves you, Prince Barrick, whether you love yourself or not.” He swallowed. “And you are all she has left, I suppose.”

  “What do you know of it—a mere soldier?” Barrick looked as though he wanted to hit him, despite the shackles on his arms. Gyir, sitting a few paces away, turned to watch them.

  “Nothing, Highness. I know nothing of what it is like to be a prince, or to suffer because of it. But I do know what it is like to lose a father and others of my blood. Of five other children in our family, I have only two sisters left now, and my mother and father both are years in the grave. I have lost friends among the guard as well, one of them swallowed by a demon beast in these lands the first time I came here. I know enough about it to say that sometimes carelessness with your own life is selfishness.”

  Barrick seemed startled now, both angry and darkly amused. “Are you calling me selfish?”

  “At your age, Highness, you would be odd if you were not. But I saw your sister before we rode out, saw her face as she begged me to keep you safe and told me what it would mean to her if she lost you too. You call me ‘a mere soldier,’ Prince Barrick, but I would be the lowest sort of villain indeed if I did not urge you to take care of yourself, if only for her sake. That is no burden, from where I see it—it is a mighty and honorable charge.”

  Barrick was silent for a long moment, anger and amusement both gone, absorbed into one of his inscrutable, cold-faced stares. “You care for her,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you, Vansen? Tell me the truth.”

  Ferras realized that even here in the dark heart of the Twilight Lands, on the way to what was almost certain death, he was blushing. “Of course I do, Highness. She is . . . you are both my sovereigns.”

  “Back home I could have you whipped for avoiding my question like that, Vansen. If I asked you whether we were being invaded, would you say, “Well, we’ll have more guests than we usually do at this time of the year?”

  Vansen gaped, then laughed despite himself, something he had not done for so long that it was almost painful. Gyir twisted his featureless face in a way that might almost have been a frown, then turned away from them. “But, Highness, even . . . even if it were so, how could I speak of such a thing? Your sister!” He felt his own face grow stern. “But I can tell you this—I would give my life for her without hesitation.”

  “Ah.” Barrick looked up. “They are going to feed us, it seems.”

  “Pardon?”

  The prince gestured with his good arm. “See, they are carrying around some kind of bucket. I’m sure it will be something rare and splendid.” He scowled and suddenly seemed little more than a youth of fourteen or fifteen summers again. “You realize, of course, that there isn’t a chance in the world it will ever come to anything?”

  “What?”

  “Stop pretending to be stupid, Captain. You know what I mean.”

  Vansen took a breath. “Of course I do.”

  “You like lost causes, don’t you? And thankless favors? I saw you help that disgusting bird to escape, as well.” Barrick smiled at him. It was quite nearly kind.”I see I’m not the only one who has learned to live with hopelessness. It makes an unsatisfying fare, doesn’t it? But after a while, you begin to take a sort of pride in it.” He looked up again. “And speaking of unsatisfying fare, here come our hosts.”

  Two Longskulls stood over them, appearing to Vansen like nothing so much as gigantic grasshoppers, although there was something weirdly doglike about them, too. Their legs were similar to men’s, but the back of the foot and the heel were long and did not touch the ground, so that they perched on the front of their feet like upright rats. The eyes sunk deep in their loaf-shaped, bony heads did not exactly glisten with intelligence, but it was obvious they were not mere beasts, either. One made a little honking, gabbling noise and ladled something out of the bucket the other was holding. It pointed at Vansen’s hands, then honked again.

  / am living in a world of firelight tales, Vansen thought suddenly, remembering his father’s old sea stories and his mother’s accounts of the fairies that lived in the hills. We are captives in some unhappy child’s dream.

  He held out his arms, showing the guards his shackles. “I cannot hold anything,” he said. The LongskuU merely turned the ladle upside down and let the mass of cold pottage drop into his hands. It did the same for Bar-rick, then moved on to the next group.

  In the end, he found he could eat only by bracing the heavy shackles on the ground, then crouching over his own outstretched hands, lapping up the tasteless vegetable pulp like a dog eating from a bowl.

  When all the prisoners had been fed the watery pottage, the LongskuU guards returned to the fire to eat their own food, which had been roasting on spits. Vansen could not see what they ate, but when the prisoners were hauled to their feet a short time later and set to marching again, he noticed the Longskulls hanging some empty shackles back on the massive wagon that held the slavers’ simple belongings, and where they swung, clinking, as the wagon began to roll.

  If Barrick had thought the Twilight Lands oppressive before, every miserable step of the forced march now seemed to take him into deeper and deeper gloom. It wasn’t simply that the pall of smoke they thought they had escaped grew thicker above them with every step, turning the land dark as midnight and making breathing a
misery, or even the dull horror of their predicament. No something even beyond these things was afflicting him, although liarrick could not say exactly what it was. Every step they look, even when they reached an old road and the going became easier, seemed to plunge them deeper into a queer malevolence he could feel in his very bones.

  He asked Gyir about it. The fairy-warrior, who seemed almost as despondent as his companions, said, Yes, I feel it, even despite the blindness my wounds have caused, but I do not know what causes it.Jikuyin is the source of some of it—but not all.

  Barrick was struck by a thought. Will this blindness of yours get better? Will the illness or whatever it is leave you?

  I do not know. It has never before happened to me. Gyir made a sign with his long, graceful fingers that Barrick did not recognize. In any case, I truthfully do not think we will live long enough to find out.

  Why are we prisoners? Is fikuyin at war with your king?

  Only in that he does not bow to him. Only in that fikuyin is old and cruel and our king is less cruel. But we are prisoners, I think, only because we were captured. Look at those around us . . . He gestured to the slow-stepping band of prisoners on either side and stretching before and behind them farther than Barrick could throw a stone. We may be rare things here, Gyir told him in his Wordless way, but these others are as common as the trees and stones. No, we are all being taken to the same place, but the more I consider, the less I think it is because we were singled out. He opened his eyes wide, something Barrick had come to recognize as a sign of determination. But I think these creatures’ master will take notice of us when he sees us. If nothing else, he will wonder what mortals are doing again in his lands.

  Again? I have never heard of him.

  Jikuyin first made this place his own long, long before mortals roamed this country and built Northmarch, but he was injured in a great battle, and so after the Years of Blood he slept for a long time, healing his wounds. His name was lost to most memories, except for a few old stories. We drove the mortals out of Northmarch before he returned. That was only a very short time ago by our count. After they had fled we called down the Mantle to keep your kind away thereafter, banishing them from these lands for good and all.

  Why did you do that?

  Why? Because you would have come creeping back into our country from all sides as you did before, like maggots! Gyir narrowed his eyes, making crimson slits. You had already killed most oj us and stolen our ancient lands!

  Not me, Barrick told him. My kind, yes. But not me.

  Gyir stared, then turned away. Your pardon. I forgot to whom I spoke.

  The procession was just emerging from between two hills and into a shallow valley and a great stony shadow across the road—an immense, ruined gate.

  “By The Holy Book of the Trigon!” Barrick breathed.

  No oaths like that—not here, Gyir warned him sharply.

  But . . . what is this?

  The column of prisoners had shuffled to a weary halt. Those who still had the strength stared up at two massive pillars which flanked the road, lumps of vine-netted gray stone that despite being broken still loomed taller than the trees. Even the smaller lintel that stretched above their heads was as long as a tithing barn. Huge, overgrown walls, half standing, half tumbled, hemmed the crumbling gate like the wings of some god’s headdress.

  It is worse than I feared. The fairy’s thoughts were suddenly faint as a superstitious whisper, hard for Barrick to grasp. Jikuyin has left his lair in North-march and made himself a new home . . . in Greatdeeps itself. This is its outer gate.

  “What is this new misery?” Ferras Vansen was clearly feeling the strangeness of the place too, not just its size and immense age but even the hidden something that pressed ever more intrusively into Barrick’s mind like cold, heavy fingers.

  “Gyir says it was something called Greatdeeps, or at least the first gate.”

  “Greatdeeps?” Vansen frowned. “I think I know that name. From when I was a child ...”

  The Longskulls came hissing angrily down the line, poking and prodding, and at last even the most reluctant prisoners let themselves be driven under the massive lintel. It was carved with strange, inhuman faces that looked down on them as they passed—some with too few eyes, some with too many, none of them pleasant to see.

  What lay beyond was equally disturbing. The wide, broken-cobbled road dipped down into a valley that lay almost hidden beneath a thick cloud of smoky fog as it wound between two rows of huge stone sculptures. Some of the stonework portrayed ordinary things cast in giant size, like anvils big as houses or hammers and other tools that a dozen mortals together could never have lifted. Other shapes were not quite so recognizable, queer representations of machinery Barrick had never seen and the uses of which he could not even guess. All the statues were old, cracked by wind and rain and the work of creepers and other plants. Many had fallen and been partially buried by dirt and leaves, so that the impression was that monstrous citizens who had once dwelled here had simply packed up one night and left, allowing the mighty road to fall to ruin after they were gone.

  Despite the apparent emptiness, or perhaps because of it, Barrick’s sense of oppression grew as they trudged forward. Even the Longskull guards grew quiet, their gabbling little more than a murmur as they moved up and down the line of prisoners, goading them forward.

  What is this place? he asked Gyir. What is Greatdeeps?

  The place where the gods first broke the earth, searching . . .

  A tennight before this Barrick had not quite believed in the gods. Now, in a place like this, the mere word set his heart racing, brought clammy sweat to his skin. Searching for what?

  Gyir shook his head. The weight that Barrick felt, the despairing thickness that seemed to lie on him like a net made of lead, seemed to weigh on the fairy even more heavily. Gyir’s head was bowed, his back bent. He walked like a man approaching the gallows, struggling to get the smoky air in and out of his lungs. The fairy’s thoughts were heavy, too, like stones—it made Barrick weary just to receive them. I cannot . . . speak to you now, Gyir told him. I must understand what all this means, why . . . I must think . . .

  Barrick turned to Ferras Vansen. “You said you thought you remembered, Captain. Do you know anything of this Greatdeeps?”

  “A memory, and only a faint one. Something—a story we children told to frighten each other when I was young, I think . . .” He frowned miserably. “I cannot summon it. What does the fairy say?”

  Barrick glanced quickly at the fairy, then back to Vansen. “Something about the gods breaking the earth here, but I can make little sense of it and he won’t say more.” The prince rubbed at his face as if he could scour away the discomfort. “But it is a bad place. Can you feel it?”

  Vansen nodded. “A heaviness, as if the air was poisoned—and by more than smoke. No, not poisoned, but bad, somehow, as you say—thick and unpleasant. It makes my heart quail, Highness, to speak the truth.”

  “I’m glad it’s not just me,” Barrick said. “Or perhaps I’m not. What will happen to us? Where do you think we’re being taken?”

  “We shall find that out sooner than we want to, I think. What we should consider instead is how we might get away.”

  Barrick held up the shackles, which although not too large for an ordi—

  nary person his size, were cruelly heavy on his bad arm. “Do you have chisel? If so, I think we’d have something to talk about.”

  “They haven’t tied our feet, Highness,” the soldier said.”We can run, and worry about freeing our arms later.”

  “Really? Just look at them.” Barrick gestured to the nearest pair of Longskulls pacing the line with their strange, springy gait. “1 don’t think we’ll outrun those, even without our legs shackled.”

  “Still, The Book of the Trigon bids us to live in hope, Prince Barrick.” Vansen looked curiously solemn as he said it—or maybe it was not so curious, under the circumstances. “Pray to the blessed oniri
to speak for us in heaven—the gods may yet find a way to save us.”

  “Speaking frankly,” Barrick said, “just at the moment, it is the gods themselves I fear most.”

  The prince seemed a little more like his ordinary self again, which was the only hopeful thing Vansen had seen all day. Perhaps it was because Gyir the Storm Lantern had almost stopped talking to him.

  Judging by the usual run of his luck and mine, he’ll come back to himself just in time to be executed by our captors, Vansen thought with bleak amusement. At least I’ll probably be killed, too. Anything would be better than to face Barrick’s sister with news of her brother’s death.