Shadowmarch

men unrolling their bedrolls would soon have to cross swords with this interesting phenomenon, that some of them would almost certainly die. It was hard for Vansen not to feel a little resentment on behalf of Dab Dawley and all the other soldiers not much older than the prince who would not be surrounded and protected as Barrick would be, to make certain their experience of battle didn’t become too dangerous.

But who is it asked me to take care of the lad, to protect him? Was it the prince himself? No, it was his sister Perhaps I do him a disservice. Vansen was unsure again sometimes Barrick Eddon seemed a mere boy, younger even than his years, petulant and anxious, at other moments he seemed a hundred years old, far beyond anything so mundane as fear of death.

“If Your Highness means perhaps it is a token force to draw us, with the rest in ambush,” said Doiney, awkward and uncomfortable at speaking to royalty, “then I say anything is possible, your good Highness, but if they have another force squirreled away, they are either so small they are hiding under the clovers or they are floating on a cloud in the sky, like, or whatever it is they say fairy folk do. Because of the morning mist we did not mark the ones on the hill until our way back, and we rode far across these lands on both sides of the Settland Road and up the far reaches of the old Northmarch way as well, across all kinds of ground.” He stopped, clearly trying to think it all through, to make sure that he had said what he meant to say. Vansen had never heard so many words out of the man in all the years he had known him. “Meaning to say, Highness, by your pardon, there are none others we can see for miles beyond except for those as are nearly on top of us.”

“What do they look like?' asked Rorick, his voice a little too gruffly ordinary to be quite believable.

“Hard to tell,” Doiney told him. “Apologies, your lordship, but it’s that cursed mist and those trees. But we could see some of them in what looked like good, plain armor, not much different than you or me, and there were horses and tents and and all you’d expect. But there were other shapes too, in the trees…” He trailed off, made the pass-evil. “Shapes that didn’t seem right at all, what we saw of them.”

Tyne stepped backward until the tree was almost against his spine. He peered out into the distance, although the wooded high place the Twilight People seemed to have chosen as their camp was blocked from view by the intervening hills. “First things first, then,” he said. “Vansen, we need a string of pickets across the hills behind them and some miles down both roads, changed often enough that they won’t start to see shapes in the night that aren’t there, but do see the ones that truly are. They must keep ears open, too. If there is some other force coming—if it is a trap—we must know about it before they arrive. And let’s have the rest start making camp.” Tyne’s sergeant ran down the hill to give the orders.

Vansen leaned over and had a few quick words with Gar Domey as the nobles talked quietly among themselves. “But the others that Muchmore took out have been back since noontime,” Vansen finished, “so tell him it’s them I want out, and you get your fellows something to drink and eat.”

Doiney nodded, then bowed to the nobles and made a clumsy, unaccustomed leg for the prince before he swung himself back onto his horse again. He cantered back toward his little troop of horsemen, visibly relieved to escape the councils of the great.

Vansen stared at the blossoming campfires. They were a reassuring sight against the descending twilight and he decided that Earl Tyne was a thoughtful commander it was doubtful the enemy was ignorant of their arrival, and the fires would give the men much-needed heart’s ease through a long, worrisome night.

“So what do we do, then, Lord Aldritch?” asked the prince. “Do you think they will they stand and fight?' “If they won’t, then we have learned something useful,” Tyne told him. “But do not doubt that I fear a trap as much as you do, Highness, although I suspect we may be overthinking. Still, if they break and run we should not follow them, in case they mean to lead us into the place we have heard about, beyond the Shadowline where everyone runs mad.”

“Almost everyone. Not our Captain Vansen.” It was hard to tell how Prince Barrick meant it, as compliment or gibe. Vansen broke the short silence. “If my experience is to be of use, then I must remind everyone that my men and I had no idea we were crossing over into into those lands so I think Earl Tyne speaks wisely If we best them, even if we seem to break them, still we should go slowly and carefully.”

Barrick Eddon stared at him for a moment, gave a sober nod, then looked around at the others and realized they were all watching him. “What, do you wait for me? I’m not a general, not even a soldier yet. I’ve said that and I mean it. Aldritch, you and the others must decide.”

The Earl of Blueshore cleared his throat. “Well, Highness, then I say we must be alert and on guard all this evening, and double the usual sentries— and that is not counting your pickets, Vansen. If these shadow folk do not stir, then in the morning when the light comes back, we will go up and test their strength. I do not think any of us much wants to go against them in these unfamiliar fields when the sun is setting.”

There were nods and a few grunts of agreement, but otherwise nobody said anything. There was no need.

* * *

Chert had been up and down the shore of the quicksilver sea a hundred times, it seemed, calling and calling until he was quite dizzy, with no reply except echoes. He had discovered no hint of a way across the liquid metal, no bridge, no mooring post, and—as best he could tell in the inconstant, flickering light—no boat on the shore at the far side. He had discovered one thing, though somewhere in the blue-and-rose-shot darkness above his head some sort of cleft must open to the distant surface, a rock chimney of sorts where the fumes could disperse into the air above Brenn’s Bay. Chert knew enough about quicksilver to know that if this were the true stuff, unaired, he likely would be not just light-headed but dead or dying.

He wondered if that could be the answer to the puzzle—could the boy have somehow come down onto the island from above? But what had Beetledown been following if it hadn’t been Flint’s scent? And how could the boy have gotten down from such a height? The rock face on the side of the silver sea—the side Chert couldn’t reach— was distant from the island, at least as far from it as the side where he stood. He had a momentary, fanciful vision of the child somehow drifting down like a mote of dust or a bit of mushroom spore, but that was ridiculous. Flint might have come from behind the Shadowline, he might be a good climber, but he had given no sign whatsoever of being able to fly.

Still, Chert walked back to the slope below the jut of stone balcony where he himself had entered and stared up the jagged face, scouting with his eye up the deer track—the ghost-deer track as he now had to think of it— wondering if there was some other way across from near the Maze itself, some high path made invisible by a trick of the light. Sighing—a sigh that the thick, hot air quickly turned into a wheeze and then a cough—he clambered back up the slope.

He paused on the balcony of the Maze, peering out at the weird glow of the Shining Man that filled the great cavern without fully illuminating it, then took out his remaining chunk of lantern-coral to make his way back through the Maze. He was glad he had reclaimed it and did not have to traverse the labyrinth in darkness again—it had been too much like his age-ceremony, too much like that sense of helplessness when he had been forced to march without touching any of his peers, following the voice of an acolyte he could not see, a voice made strange and inhuman by the dark and the echoes. But this time he would have light . .

How did Flint get through the Maze, then? It was a question he should have asked before, and Chert was again angry with himself. Did Flint go to the Salt Pool first for a piece of Boulder’s wares? Somehow Chert didn’t believe it—the little man would have said something. But how could the child have made his way through the Maze in utter blackness otherwise?

For that matter, how did he find his way around down here at all? It was a mystery to rival the strangest parts of the tale of Kermos and his fabulous battles.

Chert paused for a short rest, wondering what time of day it was now, since even his Funderling sense of how time passed in the skyless depths had been compromised by this place, then slowly made his way back through the twisting Maze. He emerged into the soft, warm light of Emberstone Reach without having discovered a single hint of how the boy might have made his way across the Sea in the Depths, or even any sign of Flint’s passage at all. Chert turned and began to make his weary way through the Maze again, more and more certain he would never know what had happened to the boy, but this time, in his exhaustion, he took a wrong turning and found himself in a section of the labyrinth he had not entered before. He could tell because it felt different beneath his feet, and he realized for the first time that the route between the Reach and the feature called the Balcony had been worn low in the middle over the centuries by the shuffling passage of innumerable feet. He also abruptly understood at least one of the ways that the acolytes made their way through the Maze in darkness. Now he found himself in a part of it where the floor stones were smoothly level, as if no one had ever walked on them