Shadowmarch

“Good. Follow on, then. We’ve got a long distance to walk.”

Chert did not have either the time or inclination to visit Boulder for any of the glowing coral, so it was with a conventional and very smoky oil lamp throwing huge shadows on the pale, sweating walls of the limestone cavern that he led Gil through the deep places underneath Brenn’s Bay. At other times, Chert thought, it would have been interesting to take this old route from a time when Funderlings had less trust of their larger brethren (for good reason) and wished an escape to be available at all times. The old Exodus Road was largely unused these days, untended in many crumbling places and navigable only with the help of a long rhyme Chert’s father had taught him that marked off the turnings as it wound from the outer reaches of Funderling Town, through dripping caverns beneath the bay and at last to the mainland. The current circumstances robbed the trip of any pleasure for Chert, not to mention his recent memories of having made his way beneath the silvery Sea in the Depths, plagued by nightmare visions every step of the way. This journey was not nearly so difficult, though it was much longer. Only the behavior of his companion made the experience anywhere near as frightening.

Gil, in fact, seemed to be suffering as Chert himself had suffered deep in the Mysteries, beset by things invisible to the Funderling—muttering, even once or twice speaking in an unfamiliar language. It was only after the lean stranger experienced his third or fourth such seizure that Chert finally realized he had seen something like this before.

Flint, down in the Eddon family tomb. The crack in the earth there. Something suddenly occurred to him, something he should have thought of before. Did Flint know —was that why he acted so crosswise in the tomb? Did he know he must one day go down there? Or did it frighten him because it called to him, and it was only a few days ago that the call finally became too strong to resist… ?

As they reached the far side where the paths turned upward again, his odd companion went through yet another change, this time as though a layer of his strangeness had actually been scrubbed away. Gil began to ask questions about where they were and how long it would take them to get to the surface that seemed as though they could have come from the mouth of an ordinary man. Chert couldn’t compass it and didn’t try: far too much of what had happened in these last days he not only didn’t understand, but felt sure he never would.

The underground way reached the surface at last on the mainland, in a bank of seaside cliffs half a mile or so north of where the causeway had stretched. As they made their way out into the daylight, or as much of it as there was on this bleak, misty afternoon, Chert saw the castle they had left behind looming just across the strait, like a toy decorously carved by a giant and set down in the water to wait his return. From this distance Chert couldn’t even see the sentries on the wall. The keep looked deserted, its windows empty as the cliff holes above his head where the shorebirds nested in spring. It was hard to believe there were any living souls at all inside that castle or beneath it.

He tried to shrug off the bleak thought. “We’re on the other side of the water. Where do we go now?” “Into the city. Those tunnels—have I ever been in them before?”

“I don’t know,” said Chert, surprised.”I shouldn’t think so.”

“Very much they remind me of… something. Some place I once knew well.” For the first time Chert could see actual emotion written on the man’s features, in his troubled eyes. “But I cannot summon it to my thoughts.”

Chert could only shrug and start down the beach. Soon the seawalls of the city were looming above them. Only the base of the causeway remained where Market Road reached the shoreline, and the sea was empty into the distance, but a few tethered boats still floated along the quay—their owners taking their chances in the keep, no doubt, hoping one day soon to reclaim them. Otherwise the docks and the waterfront taverns and warehouses were deserted. It was stunningly empty and Chert could not help staring; it looked as though some great wind had come and blown all the people away. Fear stabbed at him anew. It wasn’t just his own life: all the world had turned topside-down.

It was Gil who now took the lead, the Funderling who followed with increasing reluctance. A mist had crept down out of the hills and covered the city so that they could see only a few dozen paces ahead of them even on wide Market Road, the empty buildings on either side seemed more like the silent wrecks of ships lying on the sea bottom than anything whole-some.The damp walls and guttered roofs dripped like the deepest limestone caverns, so that their footsteps seemed to echo away multifold on all sides in a thousand tiny pattering sounds.

Everything was so gloomy and unnatural that when a half dozen dark figures stepped out of the shadows before them it seemed so much like the inevitable ending to a terrible dream that Chert did little more than gasp and stop in his tracks, blood thumping. One of the lean figures stepped forward, leveling a long black spear. His armor was the color of lead, and nothing showed of his face but a bit of bone-white skin and the catlike yellow gleam of the eyes in the slot of his helmet. The point of the spear moved from Chert to Gil and settled there. The apparition said something in a voice full of harshly musical clicking and hissing.

To Chert’s dull astonishment, Gil responded after a moment in a slower version of the same incomprehensible tongue. The gray-armored figure answered back and the exchange went on. Water dripped. The sentries moved up behind their leader, nothing much of them visible but tall shadows and a half circle of burning yellow eyes.

“It seems… we are to be killed,” Gil said at last. He sounded a little sad about this—wistful, perhaps. “I told them we bear an important thing for their mistress, but they do not seem to care. They are victorious, they say. There are no bargains left to be made.”

Chert fought against panic that threatened to clamp his throat, choke him. “What… what does that mean? You said they would want what we have! Why do they want to kill us?”

“You?” Gil actually smiled, a sad twitch at the corners of his mouth. “They say because you are a sunlander, you must die. As for me, it seems I am a deserter and thus also to be executed. She who has conquered—she was my mistress once.” He shook his head slowly. “I did not know that. Given time, it might have helped me understand other things. But it seems that time is what we do not have.” And indeed, as Gil spoke, the semicircle tightened around them. Spear points hovered in front of their bellies, an ample supply for both of them. The only choice was to die standing up or running away.

“Farewell, Chert of Blue Quartz,” his companion said. “I am sorry I brought you here to die instead of leaving you in your tunnels to find your own time and place.”

38. Silent

IN THE DARK GREEN:

Whisper, now see the blink.

And flicker of something swift.

It is alive, it is alive!

—from The Bonefall Oracles

Qinnitan stood in the corridor outside Luian’s chambers like someone blasted by a demon’s spell, amazed and defeated, waiting for death to come and take her.

When a dozen or so heartbeats had passed, her hopeless terror ebbed, if only a little. She didn’t want to give up, she realized. What if darkness was like sleep, and that huge, terrible… something was waiting for her there as well? Except in death there would be no waking, no escape from that black and gaping mouth…

She slowly shook her head, then slapped at her own cheeks, trying to make herself feel again. If she wanted to live, she would have to escape from the autarch’s own palace, an impossible task under the eyes of all his guards—and not just the guards: soon every servant would be watching for her, too, and everyone else in the Seclusion, royal wives and gardeners and hairdressers and kitchen slaves…

A glimmer of an idea came to her.

She forced herself to move, lurching back down the corridor to step through the hanging into Luian’s chamber. Even knowing what she would find, it was impossible to suppress a groan of horror when she saw the sprawled body in the center of the floor, although the purple face was turned away from her. The strangling cord