Tad Williams: Shadowheart

Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert and everyone at DAW Books receive my overwhelming gratitude as usual as we finally steer this monstrous story into port. I also want to thank our fabulous assistant Dena Chavez and my wicked-cool agent Matt Bialer, as well as the lovely Lisa Tveit who has put in tons of work making our website, www.tadwilliams.com, a fun and informative place to visit. Please come and join us there, or see me make a fool of myself on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tad.williams. Don’t worry. Nobody has died yet from too much Tad, so you probably won’t be the first.

Super, extra-big thanks and love also go to my awesome wife Deborah Beale, who put in a staggering amount of work helping me revise the late drafts of this book when she could have been doing something else fun, or at least non-Tad-related.

He was named after the tualum , small antelope that ran in the dry desert hills. As a girl, his mother had often watched the herd come down to the river to drink, so lean, so bright of eye, so brave; when she first saw her son, she saw all those things in him. “Tulim,” she gasped. “Call him Tulim.” It was duly noted down as he was taken away from her and given to a royal wet nurse.

The first things the boy remembered were the sunset-colored hangings of the Seclusion where he lived among the women for the earliest years of his life, where kind, sweet-smelling nurses held him, sang to him, and rubbed his tiny brown limbs with expensive unguents. The child’s only moments of sadness came when he was placed back in his cot and another of the monarch’s youngest children was lifted out to be cosseted and caressed in turn. The unfairness of it, that the attention which should have been for him alone was also given to others, burned inside little Tulim like the flame of the lamp he stared at each night before he fell asleep—a flame that he watched so carefully he could sometimes see it in his mind’s eye at midday, so bright that it pushed everything real into shadow.

When he was scarcely three years old, as a sort of experiment, Tulim drowned one of the other young princes in the bath they shared. He waited until the nurses were turned away to comfort another child who had been splashed and was crying, then he reached for his brother Kirgaz’s head, shoved it under the blossom-strewn water, and held it down. The three or four other children in the bath were so busy splashing and playing that they didn’t notice.

It was strange to feel his brother’s desperate struggles and to know that only inches away ordinary things went on without him. People made so much of life, Tulim realized, but he could take it away whenever he chose. He saw the lamp’s flame again in his mind’s eye, but this time it was as though he himself had become the fire, burning so brightly that the rest of creation fell into darkness. It was ecstasy.

By the time the nurses turned around, Kirgaz was floating lazily, his hair swirling on the surface like seaweed, pale flower petals tangled in it. They screamed and dragged him out, but it was too late to save him. Many princes lived in the Orchard Palace—the autarch had many wives and was a prolific father—so the loss of one was no great tragedy, but both nurses were, of course, immediately executed. Tulim was sad about that. One of them had been in the habit of smuggling him a honey-milk sweet out of the Seclusion’s kitchen each night. Now he would have to go to bed without it.

Tulim soon grew too old to live in the Seclusion, so he was moved to the Cedar Court, the part of the mighty, sprawling Orchard Palace where the young sons of nobles were raised until manhood in fortunate proximity to the royal sons of Tulim’s father, the glorious god-king Parnad. There for the first time Tulim lived with true men—only the Favored were allowed in the Seclusion—and learned manly things, how to hunt and fight and sing a war-song. With his long-legged good looks and his sharp wits, he also for the first time came to the attention of the men of the Orchard Palace, including, most surprisingly, his own father.

Most of Parnad’s sons hoped to remain unnoticed by their father. True, one of them would one day become his heir, but the autarch was a vigorous, powerful man in his fifties so that day was far away, and Xixian heirs had a way of suffering accidents. Parnad himself had found a few of his sons too popular with the soldiers or the common people. One such young man had been the sole casualty of a battle with pirates in the western islands. Another had died, purple and choking, after apparently being bitten by a snake in the Yenidos Mountains in midwinter—a most unusual season for snakebites. Thus, none of the other princes felt too jealous when their father noticed Tulim and began to speak to him occasionally.

“Who was your mother?” Parnad asked him the first time. The autarch was a big man, tall but also broad as an old crocodile. It was strange for Tulim to think that this heavyset man with his thick beard was the source of his own slender limbs. “Ah, yes, I remember her. Like a cat, she was. You have her eyes.”

Tulim wasn’t sure whether this way of talking meant his mother was no longer alive, but he did not want to ask, which might seem sentimental and womanish. If he had inherited her eyes, though, she must have been exceptional indeed, for that was the thing that people noticed first about Tulim, the strange, golden eyes like holes filled with molten metal. It was one of the reasons he had long known he was not like any of the others—that same bright, all-devouring flame did not burn within his brothers or the other children as it did in him.

He and his father the autarch had other conversations, although Tulim never said much, and after a while Tulim was taken from the sleeping room he shared with several of the other young princes and given his own room where the autarch could visit him at whatever time of the day or night he thought best without disturbing Tulim’s brothers. Parnad also began to perform various odd cruelties and unwholesome practices on him, all the while explaining to him about the terrifying responsibility of being the Bishakh—the chief of the falcon line that had come out of the desert to trample down the thrones of the world’s cities.

“The gods hold us dear,” Parnad would explain as he held Tulim’s mouth closed, silencing his cries of pain. “It is given by them that the falcon soars higher than any other—that he can look down on all creation. The very sun itself is only the great falcon’s eye.”

Tulim could not always make sense of what his father said, but as a whole the lessons, coupled with the pain and other strange feelings, made it clear that the way of the flame and the way of the falcon were more or less the same: Everything belongs to the man who can reach and grasp without fear. That man the gods love.

Still, although the visits went on for years, Prince Tulim made a vow the first night that he would kill his father one day. It was not so much the pain that had to be revenged as the helplessness—the flame should never be smothered by the shadow of another, not even the autarch himself.