(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (90 page)

“A man who knows stone and its ways is as good as any man, big ’un or Funderling, prince or kern, and he’ll never lack for things to do and think about.
” That had been another of the old fellow’s favorite sayings.

Chert was astonished to find that he was walking blind, not because his coral lamp had finally died, but because he was weeping.

Hold on, you,
he told himself.
That man strapped you raw with his tie-rope for stealing a few sugarcap mushrooms out of Widow Rocksalt’s garden. When he finally died, your mother didn’t last even a year after, not because she missed him so much but because he’d worked her so in those last years that she was just bone-tired and couldn’t go on any longer.

Still, the tears wouldn’t stop. He found it hard to walk. His mother’s face was before him now, too, the heavy-lidded eyes that could seem either beautifully dignified or painfully distant, the mouth that turned down at any hint of what she deemed an unnecessary fuss. He remembered Lapis Blue Quartz’s nimble, work-gnarled hands as she made a yarn doll for one of her grandchildren, her fingers always busy, always doing something. He couldn’t think of a time when she had been awake and those hands were not occupied.

“And what is this now?”
He could hear her as clearly as if she stood beside him, her voice sour but not without humor.
“What noise is this? Fissure and fracture, it sounds like someone’s skinning a live mole in here!”

Chert had to stop for a while to get his breath, and when he started again, it was hard just to keep walking. The walls, unbroken now even by the occasional glyph, featureless as a rabbit scrape, squeezed in on him as though they meant to catch him and hold him until the world changed. He could again imagine himself in the belly of the Shining Man, being digested and changed, becoming something hard like crystal, immobile and eternal, but with his thoughts still alive in the center of it, battering hopelessly to get out like a fly beneath an overturned cup.

And now, as though the deep places that contained him suddenly went through some sort of paroxysm, he could feel the sensation of power, the presence that he thought was the Shining Man, shift and grow less diffuse, more localized: it was something he sensed as powerfully as he could know
down
from
up
with his eyes closed—the presence was no longer smotheringly all around him, but instead had taken on a very definite location, up and ahead of him. Instead of giving him a goal, the power of it became something that pushed against him like a strong, constant wind, as though he and it were two chunks of lodestone repelling each other. Chert put his head down, eyes still prismed with weeping, and forced himself to take step after agonizing step.

What is this place? What does it all mean?
He tried to remember the words of the temple brothers at his coming-of-age ceremony, the ritual tale of the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone, but it came back only as a jumble of sonorous words that buzzed in his head almost without meaning, in pictures that were smeared like wet paint.
The earth was a broken thing,
the voices murmured and roared,
a new thing, the lights in the sky so bright and the face of the world yet so dark, the battle to take this place away from older, crueler gods a thing not of days or weeks but of aeons, throwing mountains up where no mountains had stood, tearing the face of creation so that the water rushed in and made great, steaming seas.

“In the Days when there were no Days,”
the oldest of the temple brothers had chanted, beginning the initiation ceremony, and Chert and the other celebrants had only moaned, their heads full of waking dreams that painted the dark around them, their stomachs sour from the
k’hamao
they had been given to drink after fasting and purifying themselves for two days before the being taken down into the Mysteries.
In the Days when there were no Days.

But what now? What was this? The tunnel had somehow been yanked upright like a length of string. It rose above him into the shadowy distance. Somehow Chert found himself on stairs again, but this time he was climbing, not descending, his head chaotic with ideas, with visions that were not quite visible, with the endless roar of The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone battling his foes, a roar that made the very roots of the world quiver. Chert felt that roar in his bones now, felt it beginning to rattle him to pieces, to crumble him like the sandstone cliffs his father had shown him, falling to the relentless waves. Soon there would be no more Chert, only fragments, crumbled smaller and smaller until they became dust, then the dust would scatter and waft away and spread into all the dark places even the stars had never reached. . . .

 

When his thoughts at last came back to him, when the dreams finally began to shred and disperse like wind-tormented clouds, Chert couldn’t make sense of what he saw; in fact, he wondered if he hadn’t merely passed into some different and only slightly less hectic realm of madness. He was standing at the foot of a mountain, a great jut of dark stone, a massive shadow in the thin, dim light that seemed to come from all directions and none—but how could there be such a thing, a mountain inside a mountain? Nevertheless, there it was, a monstrous black lump rising a hundred times his own height or more; he stood at its foot like an ant gazing up at a man.

Oh, Elders save me, it’s the gate, the black gate. I have climbed all the way down to Kernios . . . and Immon—Noszh-la himself—is going to find me wanting and chew me in those terrible, stony teeth . . . !

Something flickered like lightning inside the vast black shape that loomed above him. A moment later a mad radiance began to leak out from every part of it, but strongest in the center, where it formed the rough shape of a man. A shining man.

Chert stared in horrified fascination, but also with a growing sense of relief. He was standing right at its feet. He had crossed under the Sea in the Depths.

Still, he had never imagined what it would be like to stand before it. The rock seemed half translucent, half solid black basalt, and the light that streamed out bent as it came and broke into more colors than surely could be contained in a rainbow—so many colors and all moving so strangely! He had to narrow his eyes until they were almost shut and still it made him dizzy, made his head waver and his stomach lurch. He collapsed to his knees on the stony shore of the island. The heart of the blazing, coruscating brilliance did indeed have the shape of a person, although the stone—semi-translucent as volcanic glass, and the very inconstancy of the lights made it hard to discern. Still, it almost seemed to move, to writhe within the rock as though racked with nightmares, or as though it sought escape.

At last Chert could not look at it even through squinting eyes and so he lowered his face. He crouched on all fours like a dog, feeling as though he would be sick, and it was then, as the glare faded, that he saw the boy lying stretched out on the gravel slope a few yards above him.

“Flint!”
His voice flew out—he could almost see the echoes spreading and chasing each other, growing smaller like ripples. He scrambled up the loose stones. The boy was curled on his side but almost facedown, one arm reaching upslope as though offering a gift to the gleaming giant. Chert saw something flat and shiny in the boy’s hand as he turned him over, noted distractedly that it was the mirror that he and Opal had discovered in the boy’s cherished bag, the child’s one possession, but then the sight of Flint’s face, pale as bone beneath the dark dust, eyes half open but sightless, drove all other thoughts from his mind.

He would not wake, no matter how Chert shook him. At last the Funderling dragged the boy up and pulled him to his chest, then pressed the cold cheek tight against his neck and shouted for help as though there were people around to hear him—as though Chert Blue Quartz were not the last living creature in the whole of the cosmos.

The sky had lightened a shade, but still no birds were singing. Barrick’s heart hurried, fast as a dragonfly’s wings, until he found it hard to get his breath. The quiet sounds of the camp rising were all around him. He wondered if any of the others had managed to sleep.

He tested the saddle straps once more, loosened and then retightened one even though it did not need tightening. His black horse, Kettle—named to irritate Kendrick as much as anything else, who had believed in noble names for noble steeds—whickered in irritation.

Barrick watched Ferras Vansen, the guard captain, going from one smoldering fire to another, talking to the men, and found himself irritated by the man’s calm attention to duty.
Slept like an innocent child, no doubt.
He didn’t really know what to think about Vansen, but didn’t much want to trust him. No one could truly be quite that honest and forthright—years in the Southmarch court had taught Barrick that. The guard captain was playing some deeper game—perhaps the innocent one of craving advancement, perhaps something more subtle. Why else would he be watching Barrick so closely? Because he was, there was no doubt of that; Vansen’s eyes were on him every time Barrick turned around. Whatever the case, the man bore watching. Briony might have forgiven him his derelictions, but his sister’s angers were always quicker to cool. Barrick Eddon was not so easily mollified.

A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped, which made Kettle prance in place, snorting nervously.

“Sorry, lad,” said Tyne Aldritch. “I mean, your pardon, Highness. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t . . . I mean . . .”

The Earl of Blueshore stepped back. His breath smelled of wine, although he showed no signs of having drunk more than he should. Barrick remembered the stream winding down through the thorny black vines and couldn’t really blame the man for not wanting to drink from it. “Of course,” Tyne said. “It’s only that I was remembering the night before my first battle. Did you sleep?”

“Yes,” Barrick lied. What he really needed to do now, he realized, was piss. Tyne had almost frightened the water out of him.

“I was reminded of when I went as my uncle’s squire to Olway Coomb. Dimakos Heavyhand was one of the last chieftains of the Gray Companies, and he and his men had come into Marrinswalk, burning and looting. Your father was down in Hierosol with most of the hardened Southmarch fighters, but those remaining made common cause with the Marrinswalk men and such others as we could gather, then met the raiders in the valley. Dimakos had come there first and had the high ground, although we were the larger force.” Tyne smiled a hard smile. “My uncle Laylin saw that I was fearful about the battle to come and brought me to the questioning of a prisoner, a scout from Heavyhand’s company we had captured. The man would say nothing of use no matter the persuasion, I will give him that, and when it became certain we would get nothing more from him, my uncle slit the man’s throat and rubbed the hot blood on my face. ‘There,’ he told me. ‘Well-blooded is well-begun.’ Nor would he let me wash it off until we rode. It itched so that that I scarcely thought of anything else until I struck my first blow in anger.” Tyne laughed quietly. “Harsh, but my uncle was one of the old men, the hard men, and that was their way. Be glad we do not live in such times . . . although perhaps we will miss his like before long, if the gods are unkind.” He made the sign of the Three, then clapped Barrick on the back so that the prince almost lost control of his bladder once more. “Fear not, lad. You will do your father proud. We will send these Twilight folk back to their boggart hills with something to think about.”

Was that supposed to make me feel better?
Barrick wondered as Tyne walked away, but he couldn’t worry about it long, as he was already fumbling with the laces of his small-clothes.

Expecting little in the way of siege play, they had brought only a small contingent of Funderling miners, but these were also serving as gunnery men. Barrick tried to sit still in the saddle as the tiny shapes in leather hoods and cloaks, their eyes insectlike behind thick spectacles of smoked crystal, aimed the bombards up the hillside. Although he was armored, Barrick was not going in the first waves of mounted men, not least because he could only carry a light sword instead of a lance; he should have been angry at the coddling but found he was grateful. Dawn was just touching the edge of the eastern sky. The clumps of shadow were becoming bushes and trees again, and although the forest at the top of the hill was still shrouded in mist, beneath the lightening sky it did not look quite so fearsome and mysterious. In fact, everything was equally strange to Barrick’s eye just now, befogged forest and mortal army; even though he was in the midst of it, he felt as though he looked down on the scene from some high window, perhaps from Wolfstooth Spire.