Tad Williams - Shadowheart

The king continued to speak these riddling words to him, over and over, his voice as soothing to Barrick’s thoughts as the song of summer crickets. He tried to swim toward the light, but instead found himself sinking deeper and deeper into weariness and, at last, back into the oblivion of sleep.

When the servant wakened him again, it was not with a meal but a summons.

“The queen bids you join her in the Singing Garden.”

Barrick got up and followed Harsar, feeling protected still by Ynnir’s help and the king’s unfelt but still recognized presence. The Fireflower voices were not gone but at the moment they seemed muffled, as though some layer of protection had been woven between them and Barrick. He followed the small servant out a side door and beneath the gray sky, down a path of black gravel running through a bed of stones. They passed through one garden after another, concentric walled rings that used colors of flowers and stones, as well as their shapes, in ways he could not entirely grasp, but their effect was so strong and so varied that it tired him just to pass through them.

At the center was a gateway, an arch of stone wound with clinging white flowers.

“Go quietly,” Harsar said. “For your own sake.” The servant bowed then and left him.

Barrick stepped through the gate, wondering what exactly he was being warned against. Were there animals here that would harm him if they caught him—or even plants? He walked as silently as he could, grateful that the gravel path had been replaced here with a track of pure, deep grass that cushioned every step.

Water dripped quietly beside him, falling from a crack in the outer wall onto a stone, plik, plik, plik . A little farther along a series of slightly larger waterfalls trickled into shallow ponds beside the path with a sound like someone gently tapping a crystal goblet. Behind both these noises he could hear a delicate hooting which might have been the call of some contented bird sitting on its nest, but turned out instead to come from a slender tower of stone scarcely twice his own height, with a hole in its top like a needle’s eye that took in the passing wind and made it into sweet music.

The Singing Garden, Harsar had called it. The Singing Garden. Even the voices in his head fell utterly silent; as if they listened to something they had loved once but had long forgotten.

He found the queen sitting in an open pavilion surrounded by flowering trees, her eyes closed as though she slept. As he approached, Saqri stirred in the depths of her white robes, like petals brushed by the wind, and opened her eyes.

“My husband… my brother… always preferred the Tower of Thinking Clouds,” she told him. “But that place is too stark for me. I like it here. I would have missed this place if I could not have returned.”

“Returned from where?”

“The fields we will all go to someday—the fields from which you nearly did not return only a short while ago.” She nodded. “But even here, in the middle of all this peace, I could not pierce the veil around your home, which we call the Last Hour of the Ancestor.” Saqri’s face took on a troubled shadow. “Something grave and strange is happening there—something I have never known before, that keeps the words of my great-aunt Yasammez from me and mine from her.”

“But if you can’t talk to her, what can we do? We have to stop her—tell her the Fireflower is still alive. She will destroy Southmarch, otherwise.”

“The fact that she has not yet conquered it—that, I can sense—means that things must be more… complicated than we can guess.” Saqri shook her head. “But it is pointless to speak of it any more. Unless things change, I cannot speak to her. She will make up her mind and do what she feels she must, as she always has.”

“Then we should go there. We have to tell Yasammez that the Pact succeeded. The trust of the People demands it!” Fireflower voices and ideas rose in his head like splashing water, but it seemed clear to him he had the gist of it correctly. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You sound more like one of ours than one of yours.” Her lips curled in a faint smile. “Still, go to her, you say? Manchild, hundreds of leagues lie between us and them.”

“But you have these… doors. Gateways. I came here through one!”

Saqri made a strange little hissing sound—she was laughing. “Grandmother Void did not invite everyone in the world to use her roads, child! Just her own great-grandson, Crooked. You came here on one of his, made long ago when the gods still walked the world, and my folk and the Dreamless were still allies. It only survives because the lore of making and unmaking such things is lost to us—and it would only lead you back to the city of Sleep.”

“But if we can’t use that one, there must be others!”

“A few. Some had already been discovered by accident before Crooked learned the great secrets from the old woman. In fact the gods built many of their houses so that they could use those which had already been found.”

“Then we can use them, too, can’t we? You said that Southmarch is on top of—in front of, whatever you said—the palace of Kernios. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? One of those doors?”

“Any of the roads that served Kernios would be banned to us,” she said. “Even with the dark one deep in his long slumber. It is a good idea, Barrick Manchild, but it will not serve.”

“What am I supposed to do, then, just… pray ? My people will be killed! And so will the rest of yours!” He threw himself down on the steps of the pavilion at her feet and slapped the stone in frustration. “I used to think the gods didn’t even exist—now you’re telling me they’re blocking my way every direction I turn. And they’re not even awake!”

Saqri raised one eyebrow at this display but did not speak. After a moment she rose and drifted down the steps past him. She raised her hand as she passed, clearly bidding him to follow her.

“Where are we going now?” Barrick asked.

“There is another source of help that remains to us,” she said without slowing.

Barrick scrambled after her as she made her way back across the chiming, singing garden into the timeless halls of Qul-na-Qar.

There was a point at which the stairs they had been descending for so long became a level floor, but he could not quite remember when that happened; there was another point at which the inconstant, watery light of the palace dwindled and at last died, but he could not exactly remember when that had happened, either. Lastly, even the stone floor beneath his feet had ended; now he felt the give of loam beneath his feet, as though they had gone so deep beneath the castle they had left even the foundations behind. In fact, they had been walking in darkness so long now that it seemed no matter what Saqri might claim of the distance, they must have walked most of the way from Qul-na-Qar to Southmarch.

The silence of this endless dark place was of course not truly silent, at least not in Barrick’s teeming skull, but with the help of what Ynnir had told him and the feeling that the blind king himself was not too far away, Barrick was able to rise above the chaotic knowledge of the Fireflower and concentrate on staying close to Saqri, who led him not like a mother leading a child through an unfamiliar place, but like someone leading another family member through a place in which they had both lived their entire lives.

Is it confidence in me she’s showing, or contempt? It did no good to wonder, of course, because they probably meant the same thing to a Qar, somehow. Still, the voices in his head did not feel nearly as alien as they had before. He almost thought he could live with them.