Tad Williams: Shadowrise

All his life Barrick Eddon had prayed the things that made him different from others, his crippled arm, his night-terrors and storms of inexplicable grief, all the terrible legacy of his father’s madness, would prove to have some meaning—that the truth of him was something more than simply a botched and meaningless life. Now his prayer had been answered and it terrified him.

I didn’t save the queen. What if I fail with the king’s Fireflower, too? What if it will not have me?

He stood on the balcony of the king’s retiring room. A shower had just passed over the castle; the towers and pitched roofs jutted like tombstones in a crowded cemetery, dozens of different shades of damp, shiny black. In the short time since he had come the skies over Qul-na-Qar had always been wet, shifting back and forth between mist, drizzle, and downpour as though the ancient stronghold were a ship sailing through the storms.

Still, there was something peaceful about the place, and not just its near emptiness: the seemingly endless maze of halls had the quiet air of a graveyard, but one in which the ghosts had been dead too long to trouble the living. He knew things lurked in the shadows that should have terrified him, but instead he felt at home in this god’s house full of uncanny strangers. In fact, it was odd just how little he missed anything that had been his before—his home in the sunlands, his sister, the dark-haired girl in his dreams. They all seemed very distant now. Was there anything worth going back for?

Barrick grew impatient at last with the shimmer of wet roofs and his own circling thoughts. He left the room and made his way down a steep stairway of cracked white stone and out into the covered colonnade beside a dripping, empty garden. Even the strange plants seemed muted in color, their greens almost gray, their blossoms so pale that their pinks and yellows could only be seen from nearby, as though the rain had leached most of their color. From down here the castle’s many towers looked less like cemetery stones and more like the complexity of nature, full of abstract, repeating shapes—pillars and bars and chevrons of the sort human nobles used as heraldic symbols to mark their family name, but which were repeated here in endless patterns like the scales of a snake. The profusion of these basic shapes both lulled and confused the eye, and after walking for a while Barrick found even his thoughts growing weary.

Why have you given me a choice, Ynnir? he thought. I’ve never chosen well…

As if coming to answer him, a swirl of rustling leaves blew around the corner then eddied back as the king in his tattered robes stepped into the colonnade in front of Barrick, appearing from nowhere as though he had walked out of a fold in the air.

I can no longer bear to hear the weeping of the Celebrants, Ynnir told him, his thoughts fluttering to Barrick like the leaves falling on the path, so I have brought my sister—my beloved—out of the Deathwatch Chamber. Whatever you choose, Barrick Eddon, I must give her my strength soon if I am to preserve her life. I sense that the Artificer has failed at last. My own strength is fading. Soon the gift of the glass will fail Saqri too and it will no longer matter what we do.

Walk with me.

Barrick accompanied the tall king in silence as they made their way out of the wet garden and back into the echoing halls. As they walked, some of Ynnir’s servants came whispering out of the shadows, creatures of many different shapes and sizes who fell in behind them and followed at a respectful distance. The strange faces peering at him made Barrick uncomfortable, but only because he knew they belonged here and he didn’t.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said at last. “I don’t know what will happen.”

If you did, you would only be making a selection, not a choice. Ynnir stopped and turned to him. Here, child. Let me show you something. He reached up to the rag covering his eyes, touched it delicately with his long fingers. As the years of my life passed and our people’s plight became more and more grim, I turned farther and farther inward in search of anything that might save us. I lived almost every moment with my ancestors, with the Fireflower and the Deep Library, and traveled in my thoughts to places that have no names you would understand. I dove so deeply into what might be and what had been that I lost sight of what was before me. A century passed before I noticed that my wife, my beloved sister, was dying. He undid the knot at the back of the blindfold, let the piece of cloth slide free. His eyes were white as milk. Eventually I lost my sight in truth. I have not seen my beloved’s face except in memory for longer than I can remember. I will never know your face, boy, except for how you look in the minds of others. All from trying to know all that will happen. All from trying not to make any mistakes.

“I don’t… I don’t think I understand.”

One of our oracles tells us, ‘Rain falls, dew rises. Between is mist. Between is all that is.’ Let that be your answer, manchild. Do not brood too much over what went before or worry too much over what is to come. Between those two is everything that matters—all that is.

Ynnir knotted his blindfold again and walked on. Barrick hurried after him, then accompanied the king in silence for a long while, thinking.

“Could you do this even if I didn’t want you to?” he asked at last. “Could you force it on me?”

I do not understand. Could I force you to take the Fireflower?

“Yes. Could you give the Fireflower to me if I didn’t want it?”

What a strange question. Ynnir seemed tired: he was even more slow in his movements than he had been in the first hours of Barrick’s arrival. I cannot imagine such a thing—why would I do that?

“Because you need to do it for your people to survive! Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

If you take the Fireflower, Barrick Eddon, that does not mean my people themselves will survive—only what they have learned.

“But could you force it on me?”

Ynnir shook his head. It… I do not… I am sorry, child, but thoughts colored by your language will not carry the meaning. The Fireflower is our greatest gift, the thing that Crooked gave us that sets us apart from all others. Those who will carry it wait our whole lives for it, and we gain it only when our mothers or fathers are dying. Then, when we have it, we spend the rest of our lives contriving to pass it along to our heirs, the children of our bodies. To force you to take it—I cannot find the words to explain, but it is just not possible to my mind. Either you will accept it, and then we will see what comes, or you will not, and my people will continue to an end that no longer contains the Fireflower. And thus roll the days of the Great Defeat unto Time’s sleep. He stopped. We have reached the hall where Saqri waits.

The huge, dark doors were open. The king stepped through and Barrick went with him, but none of the creatures following them crossed the threshold. The hall was lit with many lights, but it was the darkness that lingered beneath the carved beams despite candles and lamps that made the strongest impression on Barrick—the darkness and the mirrors.

On either side of the hall, stretching so far that Barrick thought he must have fallen into a dream as he walked, the walls were lined with oval reflecting glasses in countless sizes, with as many different frames as there were mirrors. In each both light and shadow made a home, and in each they produced something different, so that Barrick felt he was seeing not reflections but windows which, though set closely side by side, opened into a thousand different places. He was confused and overwhelmed—but there was something more. “I have… I have been here before.”