Tad Williams: Shadowrise

Then he saw her, waiting in her shimmering white robes.

Just the sight of her crashed onto Barrick like an ocean wave, battering all his senses, submerging his mind in memories he had never had before—a forest full of red leaves, a smooth shoulder, pale as ivory, her upright form on a gray horse with snow dappling her cloak.

Saqri.

Wind Sister.

Last of the line.

Beloved enemy.

Lost and returned.

Queen of the People…

The memories crowded in until there was almost nothing left of Barrick himself at all, but at the same moment something far more powerful and far more pure struck him as well, as if a beam of brightest light pierced his eye at the same moment that a silver arrow pierced his heart.

He swayed. He could not stand. He fell to his knees before her and wept.

Saqri was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, so powerful and complicated that it hurt him just to look at her: one instant she seemed made of gossamer and cobwebs and dry twigs like a child’s doll from a hundred years gone, so old and fragile that she might fall apart under the gentlest handling, then a moment later she seemed a statue carved of hard, gleaming stone. And her eyes—her eyes, so black and deep! Barrick could not look into them without his head reeling, without feeling as though he would fall and fall without ever touching bottom.

The queen looked back at him, her face as unmoving as a mask, a mask stranger yet more familiar than any face in the world. The smallest curve at the corner of her lips made it seem as though she smiled, but her eyes and his inexplicable memories told him that she did not.

“So this is what is left of my daughter Sanasu’s precious blood?” She spoke aloud as if she could not bear to touch his thoughts. Her voice was without warmth. “This jest, this piece of strange lost material, this is what comes back to me at the end of days?”

He knew he should be angry but he did not have the strength. Just standing before her was too overwhelming. Was it her or the Firef lower that filled his head with colors and noise and heat? “I am what the gods made of me,” was all he could manage.

“The gods!” Saqri let out a short sound that might have been a laugh or a sob, but her face did not change. “What have they ever made for us that did not turn its sharp edge? Even Crooked’s greatest gift has been proved a torment.”

Even the shadows seemed to draw back as if from a terrifying blasphemy. A part of Barrick recognized that what she said was spoken from the depths of an anguish he could not begin to understand. “I am sorry… if what I am displeases you, Lady. I didn’t choose to come here and I didn’t choose the blood that runs in my veins. Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.”

She looked at him for a long time with eyes so dark and fierce he could barely sustain her gaze. “Enough,” she said. “Enough of talking. I have a husband to mourn.”

The queen came down from the dais as lightly as if carried on a breeze, her billowing robe barely seeming to touch the ground. As Barrick followed her back down the center of the hall a thousand fairy-queens and a thousand mortal princes surged toward the doorway, reflected in the mirrors on either side. Some of the Barricks even turned to look back at him. Some of the faces were nothing like his, but it was the expressions worn by some of those most like him that he found more disturbing.

They stepped out into the great chamber beyond the door of the Mirror Hall and found it thronged with fairy folk of a hundred different sorts, apparitions that were completely strange to Barrick’s eyes, and yet somehow he recognized them all— redcaps, tunnel-knockers, trows tall as trees —and even knew that the place where they were waiting was known as the Chamber of the Winter Banquet . As the queen moved past with Barrick just behind her they joined in behind, the weeping women and the small men with animal eyes, the winged shadows and others with faces like unfinished stone, swelling the procession until it filled the corridors and extended back beyond Barrick’s sight, a river of uncanny life.

He followed Saqri through a maze of unknown corridors, but names and ideas seemed to slide across them like a reflection on a still pond— Sad Piper’s Rest, the Groaning Solar, the place where Caution and Swimming Bird parted. At last they moved out beneath the open sky, across a garden of stone shapes twisted as though in uneasy sleep where the rain spattered his face and wetted his hair. The sensation was something so old and so recognizable that for a moment the other thoughts fell away and he was simply himself again, the Barrick he had always been, before the Shadowline, before the Dreamers, before Ynnir’s kiss.

What will become of me? He was not as frightened as he had been earlier, but it was hard not to mourn his losses. I will never be that person again.

On the other side of the garden— Beetle’s Wakeful Garden , his thoughts whispered, where Rain Servant held the King of Birds and told him how the world would end —they passed into a vast room, dark except for a small ring of candles on the floor and empty except for those candles and the body that lay on a flat stone at the center of the ring.

Barrick’s eyes filled with tears. He did not need to be told who this was. Now the chorus of whispers in his head served only to fog the clarity of his feelings. The one who lay before him had, in only a single day, become a sort of father to him—no, more than that: Ynnir had shown him nothing but forbearance and kindness.

The queen stood looking down at her husband’s body. The blindfold was gone, Ynnir’s eyes closed as if in sleep. Barrick took a few steps forward and then sank slowly to his knees, unable to carry the weight of the present moment any longer.

Son of the First Stone, the Leaping Stag, Clever Weakling… It was a chorus of whispers like the cooing of pigeons. Traitor!—no, Crooked’s Own ...!

Look at me, another voice said, sighing and distant. So small. So lost in the moment!

Startled, Barrick looked around. “Ynnir? ”The voice had been the king’s, Barrick was certain. Don’t leave me! He cast his thought after the king’s thoughts. The other memories, voices, ghosts, those countless shades and rags of understanding that haunted him now, all dispersed before his inquiry, but whatever of the real Ynnir had touched him was gone again.

“Old fool,” the queen said quietly as she stared down at the king’s pale, rigid face. “Beautiful, blind old fool.”

The funeral of the Lord of Winds and Thought passed before Barrick’s senses like a swollen, flooding river, the current crowded with objects that had become unrecognizable. In that dark, murmurous room shapes assembled around the king’s body, weeping, singing, sometimes making noises and gestures that Barrick could not connect with any human emotion at all, then after a space they dispersed again. Some of these mourning gestures were as complex as plays or temple rituals and seemed to last hours, while others were no more than a brief fluttering of wings above Ynnir’s silent form. Barrick heard speeches of which he could understand every word, but which nevertheless made no sense to him at all. Other mourners stood beside the king’s body and uttered a single unfamiliar sound that opened up in Barrick’s mind like an entire book, like one of the tales told by Orphan’s Night bards that lasted from sunset until dawn.

And still they came.

Rats, a thousand or more, a living velvet carpet that swirled around Ynnir and then were gone; weeping shadows; men with eyes as red as embers; even a beautiful girl made of broomsticks and cobwebs, who sang for the dead king in a voice like settling straw—all came to say their farewells. As the hours crept by, as wind and rain lashed the rooftops outside and the flames of the lamps guttered in the death chamber, Barrick came to understand, not the full depths of what was being expressed in that room, but something of what it meant to be one of these people. He saw that the procession was more than the individuals and what they had to say, or the movements they made to show their grief. Instead it was a collection of shapes and sounds in time, each separate yet as connected to the whole as letters in a word or words in a story. Time itself was the medium, and somehow—this was only a gleam of understanding, like a tiny fish in a stream, and to grab for it was to see it disappear altogether—somehow the People, the Qar, lived in time in a way Barrick’s mortal kind did not. They were both of it and outside it. They mourned, but they also said, This is what mourning is, and how it should be. This is the dance and these the steps. To make either less or more of it would be to lift it out of time, like lifting a fish from the river. The fish would die. The river would be less beautiful. Nothing else would change.