Tad Williams - Shadowmarch

“Stop, guard!” she cried.” Chaven? Merciful Zoria, what are you doing? You could have been killed! And where have you been?”

The physician looked startled and even shamefaced as he stared down at the sharp spike wavering in front of his belly. When he lifted his gaze to Briony’s, she saw that he was pale and puffy, blue-circled beneath the eyes, and that he had not put a razor to his beard for days. “My apologies for frightening you, Princess,” he said. “Although it would have been worse for me than for you, it seems.”

As great a relief as it was to see him, she was not prepared to forget her anger. “Where have you been? Merciful Zona, do you know how many times in these latest days I wanted desperately to talk to you? You have always been our adviser as well as our doctor. Where did you go?”

“That is a long story, Highness, and not one for a cold and windy courtyard, but I will tell you all the tale soon.”

“We are at war, Chaven! The Twilight People are on our doorstep and you simply disappeared.” She felt her eyes fill with tears and wiped angrily with her sleeve. “Barrick is gone, too, fighting those creatures. And there are worse things, things you do not know. May all the gods confound you, Chaven, where have you been?”

He shook his head slowly. “I deserve that curse, but largely because I have been foolish. I have been hard at work trying to solve a dire riddle— more than one, to be honest—and it all has taken longer than I guessed it would.Yes, I know about the Twilight People, and about Barrick. I was absent from the court, but not from gossip, which travels everywhere.”

She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Riddles—there are already too many riddles! In any case, I am going now to see my stepmother. I must do that before we can talk.”

“Yes, I know that, too. And I think I should accompany you.” “She is close to her time.”

“And that is another reason I should come.”

She waved at the guards to lower their weapons. “Come along, then. I will drink a posset with her, then we will go.” “It may not be so swift, Highness,” Chaven suggested.

Briony did not have the patience on this long, woeful night to try to work out what he meant.

There seemed no proper way, Chert reflected, to prepare yourself to die, but it also seemed as though this was the second or third time in the last few days he had been forced to try. “I don’t want to,” he said quietly. The armored, yellow-eyed shapes looked down at him without a glimmer of emotion, their spear points a ring of dull gleams in the grayish light, but the strange man beside him stirred.

“Of course not,” Gil said. “All that live cling to life. Even, I think, my people.”

Chert bowed his head, thinking of Opal and the boy, how little all this meant, how foolish and unnatural it was compared to his life with them. There was a rising patter that for a moment he felt certain was his own racing heart. Then he recognized the sound and looked up, not in hope, but instead almost in annoyance that the horrible waiting would continue.

The man, if it was a man, rode one of the largest horses Chert had ever seen: the top of his own head would barely reach its knees. The rider was large, too, but not freakishly so, dressed in armor that looked a bit like polished tortoiseshell, gray and brown-blue. A sword dangled at the newcomer’s side; under his arm he carried a helmet in the shape of an animal’s skull, some unrecognizable creature with long fangs.

But it was his face that was the strangest part. For a moment Chert thought the tall rider was wearing a mask of ivory, for other than the ruby-red eyes beneath the pale brow the stranger had no face, only a slight vertical ridge where a nose might be and a smooth expanse of white down to the chin. It was only when he caught a glimpse of the white neck working beneath that chin as the stranger looked Gil up and down that Chert was convinced once and for all that the stranger was not wearing a mask but his own actual flesh.

“His name is Gyir the Storm Lantern,” Gil announced suddenly. “He says we are to follow him.” Chert laughed, a broken sound even to his own ears. If he had not gone mad, then Gil had—or the world had. “Says? He has no mouth!”

“He speaks. Perhaps it is only that I feel his words inside me. Do you not hear him?”

“No.” Chert was weary, as exhausted as if seeping minerals had soaked his bones and changed them to heavy rock. When the faceless rider turned back toward the city and the guards prodded Chert with their spears, he marched ahead of them, but despite the sharp pikes at his back he did not have the will or the strength to move swiftly.

The Square of Three Gods had been draped all around with dark-colored cloths, so that even in the light of many torches the buildings hid behind veils of shadow. She was waiting for them in a chair before the temple steps, a plain, high-backed chair out of some merchant’s house that she invested with the terrible dignity of a throne.

She was as tall as Gyir but both more and less ordinary to look at; she was beautiful in a weird, drawn-out way, the planes of her brown face and her bright eyes just a bit beyond human from most angles, then—when she cocked her head to listen to some sound Chert could not hear, or to look over the square, surveying her legions who sat patiently on the ground— she abruptly seemed too extreme to pass for a person even at a distance, like something seen through deep water or thick clear crystal.

She was dressed as for war in a suit of black plate armor covered almost everywhere, but most heavily on the back and shoulders, with shockingly long spines, so that from a distance it was hard to make out her shape at all. Now that he was kneeling before her, it was clear to Chert that she had two arms and two legs and a slender, womanly figure, but even when he finally gathered the courage to look up at her, it was hard to look very long There was something in her, some blunt, terrifying power, that pushed his eyes away after only a few moments.

Yasammez, Gil had called her as he made a sleepwalker’s obeisance. His onetime mistress, he had said before. He had not spoken to her again since he knelt and saluted her, nor she to him.

The tall woman with the thickly coiling black hair now lifted a gauntleted hand and said something in the unfamiliar tongue, her voice deep as a man’s but with its own slow music. Chert felt all the hairs on his neck rise at once. This is all a nightmare, a part of him shrilled, trying to explain what could not be, but that part was buried deep and he could barely hear it. A nightmare You will wake up soon.

“She wants the mirror,” Gil said, getting to his feet.

The idea of resisting never even occurred to him Chert fumbled out the circle of bone and silvered crystal, held it out. The woman did not take it from him, instead, Gil plucked it from Chert’s palm and passed it to her with another bow. She held it up to catch the torchlight and for a moment the Funderling thought he saw a look of anger or something much like it flick across her spare, stony face. She spoke again, a long disquisition of clicks and murmurs.

“She says she will honor her part of the Pact and send the glass to Qul-na-Qar, and that for the moment there will be no more killing of mortals unless the People are forced to defend themselves.” Gil listened as she spoke again, then he replied, more swiftly and ably now, in that same tongue.

“She speaks to me as though I am the king himself,” Gil said quietly to Chert. “She says that by the success of this deed, I have won a short truce for the mortals I told her that the king speaks through me, but only from a distance, that I am not him.”