Tad Williams - Shadowheart

This was not the first time he had lost track in such a way. For several days before Winter’s Eve, the night Princess Briony had fled Southmarch with Shaso, he had been gone from the castle, or at least from his house in the outer keep, but he couldn’t remember where he had gone that time, either.

Looking again at the cavern before him, at the vast sprawl of huddled, mostly silent shapes, eyes glowing in the shadows like foxfire, he quietly asked Antimony, “If all we are is in our thoughts, how can a man know if he is going mad?”

The young monk was silent for a long time. He was large for one of his folk, but the top of his head was still a hand’s breadth below Chaven’s shoulder; when he spoke, his voice seemed to rise up from the stony floor, as if the cavern itself was speaking.

“He cannot know. Nor can a king, I suppose… which is what they say of this autarch, that he is a madman. In fact, as I think on it, Chaven, even a god might not know whether he had lost his wits, if he lost ’em.”

“And thank you, Antimony,” the physician said. “You have given me even more to worry on.” He hoped he sounded more amused than he felt.

“I do not mean to be rude,” Ferras Vansen began, “but Funderlings—and taller men, too—are not as patient as your people. Your mistress set an hour for the council to take place, and yet not only has she not come, she has not sent word as to why. Hours are passing. People grow worried.”

Aesi’uah folded her hands before her mouth, as though to blow life into a tiny flame shielded there. “Please, Captain Vansen, you do not understand…”

“No, your mistress does not understand.” He did not like arguing with her. The chief eremite was quiet and graceful, and in her own way, kind; disagreeing with her made him feel clumsy and cruel. “My allies have made a brave concession. They have opened their gates to your people, although only days ago you Qar were killing Funderlings on the doorstep of their own city. Not only that, but they have even given you a place for your army to camp—a place between themselves and their most holy place ...”

“That is because of our shared mortal enemy, the Autarch of Xis,” she began, but Vansen was still angry.

“Yes, but we were not in immediate danger from the autarch. The people of Southmarch were safe inside our castle walls, the Funderlings down here in the rock. It was your people in their camp above who were most at risk.”

She paused, but with the air of someone listening to something he couldn’t hear. He suspected she conversed with Yasammez in her head, just as he had once heard the words of Gyir Storm Lantern in the same, silent way, but knowing that did not make him feel any better. It happened to her several times an hour and had been a constant reminder that no matter how courteously she seemed to listen to Vansen, nothing would be done without her mistress’ consent.

“Please, Captain,” she said at last. “One thousand years or more of hatred and distrust do not vanish with a wave of the hand.”

“Oh, trust me, my lady, I know that very well.”

“Look there,” Aesi’uah said, gesturing with a slender hand toward the crowd of strange shapes that surrounded them, filling the natural stone gallery to the walls—perhaps a thousand Qar in this chamber alone. “Already we have done something here unseen since the earth was young. Understand that my mistress must deal with problems of her own, many of them of a subtlety that I cannot explain to someone who will live only a century.”

Vansen was surprised to feel pain at her words, although she only told the truth—he was not like her, not at all. The pain was from what it brought back to his thoughts, the equally unknowable distance between himself and the woman he loved. It was becoming clearer to Vansen every day that it had been madness even to suppose he and the princess lived in the same world.

“Just give your lady to know,” he said, “that my people are losing patience. That everybody is losing patience. And they are frightened, too.”

“As you said yourself, Captain, trust me.” Aesi’uah smiled—at least, he had always assumed it was a smile, since it seemed in many ways to serve the same function as it would have in an ordinary woman, although not always. “My mistress already knows this.”

“But, Opal… !”

She fixed him with a stare that could have split granite like a wedge. All the Leekstone women had that eye. “Don’t you dare. There should be women there and there will be women there. By the Elders, their general is a woman.”

“Exactly! And according to Vansen she has the blood of a god running in her veins and a temper like a cornered rat. She’s killed Big Folk by the hundreds… !”

His wife again gave him that shriveling glance. “I’m not planning to take up a sword and fight her, old fool. We’re welcoming them. We are allies now.”

“Not yet.” He knew he was losing, but he could not resist one last attempt to bring some perspective to the conversation. “We’re hoping to be allies. This is a sort of parley, remember? There’s no promise that they won’t change their minds and cut all our throats—which they were trying to do just a few days ago.”

“All the more reason to have a few sensible Funderling women on the spot, then,” she said with satisfaction. “It will mean that much less chance of Jasper or some other lackwit starting another fight.” She nodded. “Now, I have to go. Vermilion Cinnabar has called all the women to a meeting in the Temple library before the Qar arrive.”

“In the library? Oh, the brothers will love that.”

“The Metamorphic Brothers have had their own way too long, and so has the Guild. That’s one of the reasons we’re in this slide. Imagine, not telling anyone the Qar have been coming here for years!”

“What? How did you hear of that?”

“Vermilion Cinnabar told us. She heard it from her husband, of course.”

“Beat it out of him, more likely.” Chert had to laugh. Clearly, things were going to change whether he wished it or not. Better to be on top of the boulder when it decided to roll than in front of it. He gestured toward the boy, curled sleeping in a feral pile of blankets on the floor. “What about Flint?”

A troubled expression flitted across her face. “I was going to bring him with me, but he declares he will go with you instead.”

Chert felt bad for her. “He’s growing. He wants to be with the men ...”

“That’s not what’s bothering me, you old fool. He’s changed. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Of course. But he’s always been… unusual. ...”

“Not that. He’s changed in some other way… something new. But I can’t ...” She made a noise of frustration. “I don’t have the words for it! But I don’t like it.” For the first time he saw how upset and frightened his wife really was. “I don’t like it, Chert.”

He stepped toward her and put his arms around her middle, pulled her close, and kissed her forehead. “I don’t like it either, my love, but we’ll make sense of it. I missed you, did you know that?”

“Missed me picking up after you,” she said gruffly, but did not let go.

“Oh, yes,” he said, smelling her hair, wishing they could simply stay that way, standing together, with everything bad still yet to happen. “That as well.”

“How do you see it, Captain?” Sledge Jasper asked Vansen as they seated themselves at the table. “Do they speak our tongue, or is it all barble-barble except for that silver-haired baggage?”

“She is not a ‘baggage,’ Jasper, she is a high-ranking adviser to Lady Yasammez and a powerful figure in her own right.”