Tad Williams: Shadowplay

“No!” the gray man shrieked and tried to stand up, but something invisible had clutched him and he contorted and thrashed like a living fish dropped on a hot stone. His eyes bulged, and his muscles writhed beneath the parchment skin, knotting and coiling. A moment later great black flowers of blood appeared on his face and neck and hands. The bestial guards, still howling in pain at the light that had blinded them, began stumbling away in all directions, tearing at each other in their haste to escape the growing incandescence that pulsated between Barrick’s breast and Ueni’ssoh’s still outstretched hand.

Then the gray man caught fire.

Ueni’ssoh jerked upright, shrieking and jigging, as the glow spread up his arm and into his chest. His eyes began to burn out of their sockets. His gaping mouth vomited flame. The guards fled barking out of the wide anteroom, back into the darkened corridors of the mine.

When Barrick looked again the gray man was nothing but a hissing, twitching, blackening shape. The boy turned away in horror and disgust, crawling over the arrow-riddled corpse of his Drow guide in his desperation to get out into the daylight.

Outside, he looked down the narrow valley beyond the base of the steps, bewildered. Was he really free? What had happened? Had he destroyed the gray man somehow? He didn’t think so—it had been the mirror, defending itself. But it had done nothing until the gray man had tried to take it. Would it have let Barrick be killed if the gray man had left the mirror itself alone? He didn’t know, and he certainly didn’t want to do anything to find out.

He broke off the protruding arrowhead and pulled the arrow out of his boot, which was slippery from the blood of his slashed ankle, then he limped down the steps and onto the open ground—the end of the long road they had traveled as prisoners to come to this terrible place, however many days or even months ago that had been. Only a little more walking, however painful, and he would be out of reach of the mine’s guardians, if any were minded to follow him.

Feeble as it was, the half-light still seemed strong to him after his days in underground darkness, and so at first Barrick did not notice the trembling of some of the huge statues in front of him until one of them swayed and then fell over, landing with a shuddering crash that almost knocked him off his feet. Two more statues toppled as the soil erupted before him in great crumbling chunks. A massive shape thrust itself up out of the earth and into the daylight.

At first Barrick thought in weary horror that it was some unimaginably large spider from the depths, all hair and malformed, corpse-colored limbs and gleaming, dripping fluids. But its appendages stuck out in unexpected directions, some shattered and peeling, all smoking and oozing like melted candlewax, as though the thing were some terrible combination of sea urchin or jellyfish and butchered animal. Then he finally saw the raw face hanging between two of the limbs, oozing with the glowing golden ichor that ran through it instead of blood. The horror that had cut off his escape still had a few tendrils of singed beard around the broken-toothed maw, and that single huge, mad eye.

“You wretched little ball of shit.” The demigod’s lower jaw was shattered, drooling a liquid that looked like molten metal, and so Jikuyin’s physical voice was an unrecognizable gurgle. The words were only in his head, but so powerful despite the demigod’s countless injuries that Barrick stumbled and almost sank to his knees.

“Thought I was dead, didn’t you? But we immortals aren’t so easy to kill...!”

Barrick staggered to one side, praying he could dodge around the huge, crippled thing, but despite all his terrible wounds the demigod moved with devastating speed, scuttling crablike on his broken limbs to block the boy’s escape.

“Not so fast, man-child. Your blood will open the god’s house and I will be made whole again. This is only an inconvenience.”

Barrick’s head seemed too heavy to hold up any longer. He could not get past the thing and he certainly couldn’t outfight it. He could not go back, either. He was done.

Unless... Barrick Eddon reached into his shirt and pulled out the mirror. For a moment he felt it warm in his hand, felt its power begin to bloom again as it had when the gray man had tried to take it, but Jikuyin held up a splayed, shattered hand—Barrick thought it must be a hand—and the burgeoning flare of light suddenly died.

“Whatever it is,” Jikuyin told him, “ it is a lesser power than mine, mortal boy .” His single, bloodshot eye no longer had the means to show expression—the meat of his face was too ravaged for that—but Barrick could tell the demigod was pleased and even amused. Barrick knew also that what Jikuyin said was true—the mirror was now cold and inert. “After all, the blood of the great gods runs in my veins...!”

Something dropped down out of the sky, covering the demigod’s face for a moment like a living black shadow. Jikuyin let out a screech of startled pain that ripped through Barrick’s brain and knocked him to his knees. When he managed to climb back onto his feet, Barrick saw that the black shape was gone and that the spidery demigod was moaning and rubbing at his face. When he took his limbs away, the place where Jikuyin’s single remaining eye had been was now a welling crater of radiant gold.

Blind...! He’s blind! Barrick knew he had only one chance: while the monster shrieked and thrashed his tattered arms in fury, Barrick put his head down and ran at stumbling speed straight toward him, then veered wide, diving and rolling just beneath the grasping talons of a gold-dripping hand the size of a wagon wheel.

The giant sensed that he had missed his quarry and let out a rasping, wordless bellow that shook the very hills around them, so that stones came tumbling down out of the heights. Barrick did not stop to look, but ran as fast as his exhausted muscles could carry him, gasping for breath with every step. The god’s cries of rage dwindled behind until at last they were only a distant noise like thunder.

He had finally staggered far enough to feel safe. He dropped onto his hands and knees, straining for breath. A black shape plummeted down out of the air, its wide wings brushing him as it landed. It took a few hopping steps and then leaped up onto a rock to regard him with a bright eye. Barrick had never thought he would be so pleased to see the horrid creature.

“Skurn—is that you?”

“Where be my other master?”

It took a moment for Barrick to realize what the bird was asking. “Vansen. He...he fell. Down in the mine. He’s not coming out.”

The raven regarded him carefully. “Saved you, I did. Poked that big one’s eye right through, did. Was that Jack Chain?”

Barrick nodded, too tired to speak.

“Then I be the mightiest raven what ever lived, be’nt I?” The bird appeared to consider this, walking back and forth along the top of the stone, clucking a bit. “Skurn the Mighty. Pecked out a god’s eye.”

“Demigod.” Barrick rolled onto his back. He had better be far enough away now, because he couldn’t move another step.

Skurn leaned back his head. His throat pumped, swallowing. “Mmmm,” he said. “God’s eye. Slurpsome. Wishet I’d got the whole thing.”

Barrick stared at the bird for a moment, then began to laugh, a ragged, painful bray that went on and on until he began to choke.

When the boy had his breath again and was sitting up, a thought came to him. “Tell me, you horrible creature, do you know where Qul-na-Qar is? The House of the People?”

The raven regarded him. “What be in this plan for me?