Tad Williams: Shadowplay

“ Love her? Who are you talking of? That she-dragon who led the enemy? That spiky bitch with the white sword? May the gods save us, Prince Barrick, she must have put some kind of evil spell on you!”

The red-haired boy shook his head again, forcefully this time. “No. That is not true. I do not know how I know, or...or even what I know, but I know that isn’t the truth. She revealed things to me. Her eye found me and she laid a task on me.” He turned to the one he had named Gyir, who was watching with the bright, sullen glare of a caged fox. For a moment, Barrick sounded like his old self. “Tell me, why has she chosen me? What does she want, your mistress?”

There was no reply that Vansen could hear, only the pressure in his head again, but more gentle this time.

“But you are high in her confidences,” said Barrick, as if carrying on an ordinary conversation. “You are her right hand.”

Whatever answer he thought he heard, though, it brought the young prince no happiness. He waved his hand in frustration, then turned back to the fire, refusing to speak more.

Ferras Vansen stared at the impossible creature. Gyir, if that was truly his name and not some madness of the prince’s, did not seem disposed to move, let alone to try to escape. The huge welt on the creature’s forehead still seeped blood, and he had other ugly wounds that Vansen felt sure were bites from the strange lizard-apes, but even so the dalesman could not imagine sleeping while this monstrosity lay just on the other side of the fire. Could the prince really talk to him? And how did a thing like that survive, with no mouth or nose? It seemed utter madness. How did it breathe, how did it eat?

I am trapped in a nightmare, he thought, and it grows worse with each passing hour. Now we have invited a murderous enemy to share our fire. He propped himself against an uncomfortable tree root in the hopes it would keep him awake and alert. A waking nightmare, and all I want to do is sleep... The rain had abated when Vansen woke, but water still drizzled from the trees, pattering on the thick carpet of fallen leaves and needles like a thousand muffled footsteps. There was light, but only the usual directionless gray glow.

Vansen groaned. He hated this place. He had hoped never to see this side of the Shadowline again, but instead—as though the gods had heard his wish and decided to play a cruel joke—it seemed he could not stay out of it.

He started up suddenly, realizing he had drowsed when he had been determined not to—with one of the deadly Twilight folk in their camp! He clambered to his feet, but the strange creature known as Gyir was asleep: with most of his faceless head shrouded in his dark cloak, he looked almost like a true man.

The prince was also sleeping, but a superstitious fear made Vansen crawl across the sodden carpet of dead leaves that separated them so that he could get a closer look. All was well: Barrick’s chest rose and fell. Vansen stared at the youth’s pale face, the skin so white that even by firelight he could see the blue veins beneath the surface. For a moment he felt unutterably weary and defeated. How could he possibly keep one frail child—and a mad one at that—safe in the midst of so much strangeness, so much peril?

I promised his sister. I gave my word. Even here, surely, at the end of the world, a man’s pledge meant something— perhaps everything. If not, the world tottered, the skies fell, the gods turned their back on meaning.

“Gyir will ride with me,” Barrick announced.

The Twilight man stirred, beginning to wake, or at least beginning to show that he was awake. Vansen leaned closer to the prince so he could speak quietly. “Highness, I beg of you, think again. I do not know what magic has possessed you, but what possible reason could you have to take this enemy with us—a creature whose race is bent on destroying all our kind?”

Barrick only shook his head, almost sadly. “I cannot explain it to you, Vansen. I know what I must do, and it is something far more important than you can understand. I may not understand it all myself, but I know this is true.” The prince looked more animated than he had since they had first ridden from Southmarch weeks before. “And I know just as clearly that this man Gyir must complete his task as well. He will ride with me. Now give him his armor and his sword back. These are dangerous lands.”

“What? No, Highness—he will not have his sword, even if you call me traitor!”

Gyir had awakened. Vansen saw an expression on the creature’s featureless face that almost seemed like amusement—a drooping of the eyelids, a slow turn away from Vansen’s scrutiny. It enraged him, but also made him wonder again at how the creature lived at all, how it ate and breathed. If it could not make a recognizable expression on the curved skin of its face, how did it communicate to others? The prince certainly seemed to think he understood him.

Gyir chose to retain his thundercloud-blue breastplate and his helmet, but left the rest of his armor where it had been thrown. Already the grass seemed to be covering it over. The tall fairy sat behind Barrick on the strange dark horse the prince had brought from the battlefield. The tall Twilight demon Gyir could snap the boy’s neck in an instant if he chose, but Barrick seemed undisturbed to have him so near. Together they looked like some two-headed monstrosity out of an old wall-painting, and Vansen could not help superstitiously making the sign of the Three, but if this invocation of the true gods bothered Gyir in any way, he gave no sign of it.

“Where are we going exactly, Highness?” Vansen asked wearily. He had lost command of this journey long ago— there was no sense in pretending otherwise.

“That way,” Barrick said, pointing. “Toward high M’aarenol.”

How the prince could claim to see some foreign landmark in this confounding eternal twilight was more than Ferras Vansen could guess. Gyir now turned his ember-red eyes toward Vansen, and for a moment he could almost hear a voice inside his skull, as though the wind had blown a handful of words there without him hearing them first— words that were not words, that were almost pictures.

A long way, the words seemed to say. A long, dangerous way.

Ferras Vansen could think of nothing to do but shake the reins, turn his horse, and ride out in the direction Barrick had indicated. Vansen had lost his mind to madness once before in this place, or as near to it as he could imagine. Perhaps madness was simply something he would have to learn to live in, as a fish could live in water without drowning.

The face was cold and emotionless, the skin pale and bloodless as Akaris marble, but it was the eyes that terrified Chert most: they seemed to glare with an inner fire, like red sunset knifing down through a crack in the world’s ceiling.

“Who are you to meddle in the gods’ affairs?” she demanded. “You are the least of your people—less than a man. You betray the Mysteries without apology or prayer or ritual. You cannot even protect your own family. When the day comes that Urrigijag the Thousand-Eyed awakes, how will you explain yourself to him? Why should he take you before the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone to be judged and then welcomed, as the righteous are welcomed when their tools are at last set down? Will he not simply cast you into the void of the Stoneless Spaces to lament forever...?”