Shadowmarch

grown up. Here a fire could start so far away that you had never even seen the people whose houses it took first, but still come rushing down your own narrow street like an army of angry demons, jumping from roof to roof at horrifying speed. Was it a fire? Somewhere a bell was ringing, ringing, and more people were shouting. Someone was running through the streets calling for the reeves. It had to be a fire.

She was already shaking Onsin awake when she heard a voice louder than the others, perhaps at the bottom of their own road, screaming, “We are attacked! They are climbing the walls!” Finneth’s heart lurched. Attacked? Climbing the walls? Who? She was heaving at Onsin’s bulk now, but he was like a great tree, too much for her to move. At last he rolled over and sat up, shaking his head.

“War!” she said, tugging his beard until he knocked her hands away. “The reeves are out—everyone’s crying war!”

“What?” He slapped and pinched at his face as though it were not his own, then heaved himself up off their pallet. Agnes was awake and making questioning sounds, crying a little. Finneth pulled the child’s blanket around her and kissed her, but it didn’t soothe her, and Finneth had to see to Fergil as well. The boy was waking but still half in a dream, twitching and looking around as though he had never seen his own house before; for a moment the sight of her confused children brought tears to Finneth’s eyes.

Onsin had pulled on his heavy breeches and, strangely, his best boots, but had not bothered with a shirt. He had his hammer in one hand, the hammer that no one else in the drove road could even lift, and an ax he was straightening for Tully Joiner in the other. Even in this wild moment Finneth thought her husband looked like something out of an old story, a kindly giant, a bearded demigod like Hiliometes. He was listening to the shouting, which had moved down to the end of the street. Now Finneth heard another sound, a rising wail like the wind, and she was filled with a helpless, sickening terror unlike any she had known.

“I will be back,” Onsin said as he hurried out the door. He did not kiss his children or wait for her blessing, which only added to Finneth’s growing despair.

Attacked? Who could it be? We have been at peace with Settland since befort Grandmother’s time Bandit--? Why would bandits attack a town?

“Mama Where did Papa go?' asked little Fergil, and as she squatted to comfort him, she realized she was shivering, wearing nothing but the blanket she had wrapped around her. “Papa went out to help some other men,” she told the children, then began to pull on her clothes.

She couldn’t believe that it could still be the same night—that only just the other side of the midnight bell she had been lying in her bed thinking about Onsin’s snoring, worrying about the sound Agnes was making when she breathed. It was as though Perin himself had lifted a hammer large as a mountain and brought it down on all their lives, smashing everything into powder.

Candlerstown was aflame, but fire was the least of her worries now. The streets were full of shrieking figures, some bleeding, others only running aimlessly mad, eyes staring wide and dark out of pale faces, mouths open holes. It was as though the earth had vomited out all the unhappy dead. Finneth couldn’t think, didn’t want to think—such terror was too large to fit into one head, one heart, especially when she had to cling to a pair of frightened, weeping children and try to find a place where the flames were not burning, where people were not screaming. But there was no such place anywhere.

Worst of all were the glimpses of the invaders, impossible nightmare shapes clambering over walls and dashing across rooftops—some in animal shapes, others bent and twisted as no living thing that could wear armor and carry a weapon should be. As she dragged the children past a pubhc square she saw a tall figure on a rearing horse in the midst of a crowd of Candlerstown men, and that figure looked so much like a man that for an instant she was heartened—here was some noble lord, perhaps even Earl Rorick himself, a person Finneth had never seen despite his importance in her life. Yes, Rorick must have come down from his castle at Dale House to rally the frightened townfolk and lead them against these monstrous invaders. But then she saw that this shaggy-haired lord was taller than any man, that he had too many fingers on his long white hands, and that his eyes, like those of his rearing horse, were as flame-yellow as a cat’s. As for the men around him, the ones she had thought he might be rallying, they were crawhng and moaning beneath his horse’s hooves as he pricked at them with his long spear, driving them like a flock of sheep to slavery or death.

Agnes stumbled and fell and Fergil began to shriek. She caught them both up in her arms and limped away from the square. She was in a part of the town she hardly seemed to know at all, but everything had become something else on this ghastly night it might be her own street for all she could be certain, her own house that she staggered past as barking, whistling shapes came pouring out of the windows like beetles from a split log. Overhead, the stars had vanished Fmneth couldn’t understand that either. Why were there no stars, and why had the sky turned that dull, dark red? Was it blood—was the whole town bleeding up into the sky? Then she knew. It was the smoke of burning Candlerstown itself, hiding what was happening even from Heaven.

She found herself in a crowd of people, although it was more river than crowd, a heedless wash of screams and waving arms that flooded down the Marsh Road, past the Trigonate temple. The outer walls and roof of the temple were crawling with something that looked like moss but which glowed like sullen lightning. The priests had nearly all been slaughtered, although some of them were still crawling despite terrible, obviously mortal wounds In their haste to flee, the shrieking crowd was trampling the survivors, which might have been a mercy. Even Finneth stepped on a motionless human figure and did not care—it was all she could do to keep upright. She could not stop, could not turn, certainly could not waste pity on the dead and soon-dead. She was hemmed in on either side and all she could think of was holding Agnes and Fergil tight against her, so tightly that even the gods could not pull them from her.

All who fell now were crushed underfoot. The crowd moved like a single living thing, rushing to the open Eastside Gate and the darkness beyond, toward the blessed cold fields where no fires burned.

Finneth ran until she couldn’t run any farther, then shoved her way to the outskirts of the torrent of people, which was beginning to slow and scatter.

They were outside the walls, knee-deep in the stubble of a harvested field, when she fell to the ground at last, exhausted and helpless. She wondered if she, too, might be dying, she was not wounded, but it seemed impossible anyone could experience such a night and live. She clutched her son and daughter and wept, every sob clawing painfully at her smoke-scorched throat.

Gone, all gone —Onsin, her house, her few possessions. Only these two small, precious, panting creatures kept her from running back to throw herself into the flames of Candlerstown. Most dreadful of all, as she lay with her shivering children on the cold ground just outside the murdered town, she could hear the destroyers of everything she had, and they were singing. Their voices were painfully lovely.

Darkness claimed her then, but only for a while.

28. Evening Star

WHITE SANDS:

See the moon scatter diamonds

His work is bone and light and dry dust

In the garden where no one strays

—from The Bonefall Oracles

She had lost track of how many different Favored had taken her up as though she were an ill-wrapped package, walked her to the next way station, and then turned her over to another functionary, but at last she was led into the receiving room of the paramount wife Arimone looked up from her cushions and smiled indulgently as Qinnitan abased herself. “Oh, do get up, child,” she said, although she looked not much more than a girl herself. “Are we not all sisters here?'

If we were all sisters, Qinnitan could not help thinking, I wouldn’t have gone down on my knees in the first place. The invitation had arrived that morning and Qinnitan had spent hours under the expert ministration of a half dozen slaves, a mix of Favored and born-females, until her appearance had been polished to a blinding brilliance like a gemstone, after some consideration, she was then