Tad Williams: Shadowrise

The candles at last flickered out. New tapers were lit, and this itself seemed but another part of the dance, another bend in the river. Barrick let it all flow over him and through him. Sometimes he found himself knowing before someone spoke, or sang, or presented their silent tribute, who they were and what they had brought. Other times he was lost in the strangeness of it all, as when he had been a child and had listened to the wind skirling around the chimneys and under the roof tiles of his home, overwhelmed by suggestions of meaning that he knew he could never grasp, by the eternal mortal frustration of being so small against the uncaring vastness of the night.

He surfaced at last out of a darkness full of dwindling song and shadow. The great room was empty. The king’s body was gone. Only the queen remained.

“Where… where is he… ?”

Saqri was as still as the statue she resembled, gazing at the empty dais. “His husk… is being returned. As for the truth of Ynnir… he has chosen to give his last strength to wake me, and now he and his ancestors are lost to us forever.”

Barrick could only stand, uncomprehending.

“And so we move a step closer to the end of all things,” she said as she turned toward him, although she barely seemed to see him and spoke as though to herself. “What is your place in it to be, mortal man? What is written in the Book for you? Perhaps you are meant to keep a shadow of our memory alive, so that when we altogether vanish, still a dim, confused recollection might trouble the victors. Do we trouble you? Have you an inkling of what you have destroyed?”

So fierce, so bright—like a fire! a voice inside him whispered, but Barrick was too angry to pay it any mind.

“I have destroyed nothing,” he told her. “Whatever my great-grandfathers did is nothing of mine—in fact, it has cursed me too! And I did not choose to come here—I was sent by your… porcupine woman, Yasammez.” A little of his confusion suddenly fell away, as though someone had wiped a layer of grime from an old, shiny thing. “No, I did choose to come here, at least in part. Because Gyir wanted me to. Because the king called me, asked me… urged me. I didn’t ask to be born at all, and I certainly didn’t ask to be born with Qar blood burning inside me. It almost drove me mad!”

The expression on the queen’s perfect, eggshell-delicate face did not change, but she was silent for a while.

“She did choose you, didn’t she—my dear one, my love, my ancestor? ” Saqri moved a step closer to him, lifted a hand and brushed his face. “What did she see?” Although she was no taller than Barrick and slender as a reed, it was all he could do not to shrink back from her touch. Her fingers on his brow, like her husband’s kiss, were cool and dry. “Did Yasammez mean only to taunt him? She never cared for my husband—not as I did. She thought he was too lax a protector of the People, that he valued doing what was right over doing what was necessary.”

But they are the same, something murmured in Barrick’s thoughts. The queen yanked her fingers away from his face as though she had been burned. “What trick is this? ” Her hand shot out again like a striking snake, then flattened with surprising delicacy over his eyes, pressing firmly on the space at the center of his forehead. “What trick… ?”

A moment later she staggered back, the first less than perfectly graceful movement he had seen her make. Her eyes widened. “No. It is not possible!”

In this place of ancient knowledge and timeworn ritual, such obvious surprise frightened Barrick. “What? Why are you looking at me that way?”

“He is… he is in you! I feel him but I cannot touch him!” Something that now lived inside Barrick was unmoved by her consternation, even amused. “He said he would try to pass the Fireflower to me.”

“No!” She practically shrieked it, although he realized a moment later it was only the difference from her usual measured tone that was so startling. “You are a mortal. You are a whelp of the creatures who raped us… murdered us!”

We are all children of both the good and evil that has gone before us.

Ynnir? Is that you? Barrick tried his best to catch at the thought, but it was gone again. He realized that the queen was standing directly before him, her eyes so intent that it almost hurt to face them. She clutched his arm; her grip was astoundingly strong.

“What do you feel? Is he there, my brother… my husband? Does he speak inside of you? What of the Forerunners, do you feel them as well?”

“I… I don’t know ...” And then Barrick felt it swimming up from the depths and for a moment his limbs, his tongue, his head was not his own. “We are here, all of us,” said his mind and his mouth, but Barrick himself was none of it. “It is not what we expected and many of us are confused… many others are lost. Never before has the Fireflower passed like this. It is all different ...” Then the alien presence fell away and Barrick commanded his own limbs once more—but everything had changed, he knew. Everything was different and it always would be.

The queen continued to stare at him but her eyes now seemed far away. Then she simply folded, her white robes rustling faintly as she slumped to the ground. Shadows coalesced from the corners and hidden places of the great chamber, servitors who had waited silent and unmoving all this time. They surrounded her, then bore her up and carried her away.

Barrick could only stand and watch them go, alone with the tribe of incomprehensible strangers who lived now in his blood and his thoughts.

A’lat—a Xandian priest

Anamesiya Tinwright—Matt Tinwright’s mother

Ananka—from Jellon, first Hesper’s, then Enander’s mistress

Anglin—Connordic chieftain, awarded March Kingdom after Coldgray Moor

Anglin III—king of Southmarch, great-grandfather of Briony and Barrick

Anissa—queen of Southmarch, Olin’s second wife

Antimony—a young Funderling temple brother

Argal the Dark One—Xixian god, enemy of Nushash

Ash Nitre—in charge of gunflour for Funderlings

Autarch—Sulepis Bishakh am-Xis III, monarch of Xis, most powerful nation on the southern continent of Xand

Avidel—Theron’s apprentice

Avin Brone—count of Landsend, the castle’s lord constable

Axamis Dorza—a Xixian ship’s captain

Ayann—brother of Yasammez, Yasudra’s husband

Ayyam—a Qar, ancestor of Kayyin/Gil

Azurite COPPER—aka “Stormstone”, famous Funderling Highwarden

Barrick Eddon—a prince of Southmarch

Baz’u Jev—a Xandian poet

Beetledown—a Rooftopper

Big Nodule (Blue Quartz)—Chert’s father

Bingulou the Kracian—Finn’s first master

Bone—a bandit

Brambinag Stoneboots—a mythical ogre

Brennas—an oracle whose head was said to have survived his execution by three years.

Brigid—a serving-woman at the Quiller’s Mint

Briony Eddon—a princess of Southmarch

Brother Okros Dioketian—physician-priest from Eastmarch Academy

Caradon Tolly—Gailon’s younger brother

Caylor—a legendary knight and prince

Chalk—a Kallikan drumstone priest

Chaven—physician and astrologer to the Eddon family

Chert (Blue Quartz)—a Funderling, Opal’s husband

Cheshret—Qinnitan’s father, a minor priest of Nushash

Children of the Emerald Fire—a Qar tribe

Cinnabar Quicksilver—a Funderling magister

Clemon—famous Syannese historian, also called “Clemon of Anverrin”

Col—a bandit

Conary—propietor of the Quiller’s Mint