Tad Williams: Shadowheart

As he approached the age at which boyhood would be set aside and manhood put on like a new garment, Tulim began to spend time with another grown man, this one much more deferential toward his feelings. It was the man he called Uncle Gorhan, one of the autarch’s older half brothers. Gorhan had been sired by Parnad’s father on a woman of extremely common blood, and so was no threat to take the throne. He had used this sullied nobility to his advantage, becoming one of the autarch’s most trusted councillors, a man of storied wisdom and ingenuity. His attraction to Tulim was both less physical and less metaphysical than that of the boy’s father: he saw in the youth a mind like his own, one that could, with proper training, roam not just beyond the walls of the Orchard Palace or the boundaries of Xis but through all the endless corridors of the gods’ creation. Gorhan it was who taught Tulim to read properly. Not simply to recognize characters printed on vellum or reed paper and glean their sense—all princes learned that—but to read as a way of harnessing new wisdom to one’s own like draft oxen, or adding new ideas to one’s own like soldiers, so that the reader’s power grew ever greater.

Gorhan introduced Tulim to the works of famous tacticians like Kersus and Hereddin, and historians like the great Pirilab. Tulim learned that the thoughts of men could be saved in books for a thousand years—that the great and learned men of other ages could speak as if to his own ear. Even more important, he learned that the gods and their closest followers could also speak across the great abyss of time and the greater abyss that gaped between earth and Heaven, sharing the secrets of creation itself. In the words of the warrior-poet Hereddin, which Gorhan quoted to him, “He who reaches only for a throne will never grasp the stars.” Tulim understood that and felt that his uncle also must have a wisdom beyond other men, a wisdom only a little less than the gods: Gorhan had clearly sensed that Tulim was like no other, that he was greater even than the blood of his father that rushed through his veins. Gorhan understood that Tulim was a child, not of a man, but of Heaven itself.

Over the years, as Tulim grew older and his boyish limbs gained the supple sinews of young manhood, his father the autarch lost interest in him, which only confirmed him in his hatred. The autarch had only wished to use him, and not even for that which made him unique, but for those qualities he shared with any other handsome boy. If Tulim could have killed Parnad, he would have, but the autarch was not only constantly attended by his fierce Leopard guards but was himself a man of astounding strength and practiced, unflagging attention, even while engaged in activities which would leave a lesser man distracted or drowsy. In any case, generations of Xixian Autarchs had been protected by the existence of the scotarchs, the special, temporary heirs who were not of the autarch’s direct line, men who would take the throne in the event of any autarch’s suspicious death and mete out justice before handing the throne over to the true heir—providing that heir had not been the former autarch’s murderer. It was a strange old custom; one with many twists and turns, but it had kept centuries of autarchs safer from intrigue than almost any other nation’s monarchs.

So Tulim could do nothing except wait, and study, and plan… and dream.

At last came the day when the rectangular gongs in the Sycamore Tower and the Temple of Nushash sounded the royal death-knell. Parnad, only a little more than three-score years old, had died in the Seclusion, in the bed of one of his wives. Although there was no sign of foul play his scotarch promptly had the wife and her maids tortured to make sure they had no guilty knowledge, then executed them, which served as a reminder to other palace dwellers of how unsafe it was to be involved, even innocently, in the death of an autarch. The period of mourning began, after which Dordom, the oldest son, already a general in the army and a warrior of renowned skill and cruelty, would ascend to the throne.

But Dordom died choking the night of Parnad’s death and it was whispered throughout the Orchard Palace that he had been poisoned. That began to seem even more likely when three more of Parnad’s brothers (and a few of their friends, servants, and mistresses who happened to share the wrong plate or goblet) also died from some strange poison that could not be tasted or smelled, did not act at once, but then ate the victim away from inside like spirit of vitriol.

One by one the other heirs fell, poisoned like Dordom, stabbed in their sleep by servants thought incorruptible, or strangled by assassins while in the throes of love, with guards waiting outside who, apparently, heard nothing. Several of Parnad’s less ambitious sons and daughters, seeing which way the winds of change were blowing, took their families and left Xis altogether to avoid their own deaths (which, nevertheless, eventually found them.) Others fell into the spirit of the game and for a year ancient Xis was like a single huge shanat board, with every move by a surviving member of the royal family considered and countered. Tulim, who was twenty-third in the line of succession, was not even considered as a possible culprit in the early deaths—many people believed that Parnad’s death had set off a long-prepared, murderous rivalry between many of the aspirants to the throne. In fact, during the Scotarch’s Year (as it was afterward called) most inhabitants of Xis, and certainly the wisest minds in the Orchard Palace, believed that the struggle for supremacy was between Dordom’s younger brothers, the princes Ultin and Mehnad, who survived as other heirs fell or fled until only they, Tulim, and a demi-handful of others remained alive in Xis.

Most of the wisest courtiers felt certain that Tulim’s survival was a mark of how little a threat he was to anyone. The few who knew him better, who might have had suspicions that things were not as they seemed, also knew him well enough not to gossip about him. Many of these truly wise ones survived to serve him.

Wisest of all, of course, was Uncle Gorhan, who had recognized a certain implacability in young Tulim—perhaps the reflection of his inner flame—and cast his own fate with the obscure princeling, so far from the throne. This was a genuine gamble on Gorhan’s part because he was the sort of wise, unthreatening elder most likely to survive the accession of a new monarch, most likely to carry his service through another reign or even two, to die at last peacefully and in dignity and then be interred along with as many as a thousand living slaves, a mark of the royal family’s great favor. Instead he was risking everything on one unlikely throw of the dice… or so it would have seemed to anyone who had not looked deeply into Tulim’s disquieting golden eyes.

“I could do nothing else, Blessed Highness,” Gorhan told him. “Because I knew what you would be when I first saw you and nothing could make me betray you. You and I, we are like this.” The older man lifted his hand, index and middle fingers raised and pressed tight together to show the completeness of his connection to Tulim. “Like this.”

“Like this, Uncle,” echoed the prince, raising his own hand, fingers twinned. “I hear you.”

As it happened, it was not long until their partnership bore its final fruits. One of the lesser princes was having an uncomfortable dinner with Mehnad, one of the two main rivals for the throne. In the midst of the meal the lesser princeling began to breathe like a man who had an entire duck egg stuck in his throat. He turned black, lurched to his feet and walked through the sumptuous meal set on the floor without seeing it, then fell into a crowd of servants bearing finger bowls and wine jugs, making such a clatter that for long moments it obscured the fact that his young wife had also died of a similar, although quieter, apoplexy.