Shadowplay

the Storm Lantern’s featureless face showed in his eyes alone, wide with excitement and fear, but also hot with rage. Just beyond Gyir, Prince Barrick swayed as if in a high wind, scarcely able to balance even on his knees, his face a pale, sickly mask in the flickering light. For a moment Vansen could see the sister’s handsome features in the brother’s, and suddenly he felt his almost-forgotten promise stab at him like a dagger. He could not surrender while there was breath in him—he had an obligation. Despair was a luxury.

Prayers to the Trigon brothers seemed pointless on the very doorstep of the Earthfather’s house. Unbidden, another prayer wafted into his thoughts like a fleck of ash floating on an updraft, a gentler prayer to a gentler deity— an invocation of Zoria, Mistress of the Doves. But although his lips moved, he could not make his clenched throat pass the words. Zoria, virgin daughter, give me...give to me... A moment later the Zorian prayer, Zoria herself, even his own name, all blew out of Ferras Vansen’s mind like leaves in a freezing wind as Jikuyin stopped in front of them and leaned down. His face was so huge it seemed the cratered moon had dropped from the sky.

“A gift to you.” The demigod’s voice shook Vansen’s bones; his breath smelled like the fumes from a smelter’s furnace, hot and metallic. “You will witness my supreme moment—and even participate.” The curtain of dangling heads swayed stared sightlessly, shriveled lips helplessly grinning.

I’ll be joining them soon, Vansen thought. How would the gods judge him? He had done his best, but he had still failed.

Jikuyin’s great, bearded head swiveled to inspect Vansen and his companions, and Vansen had to look away—the god’s eye big as a cannonball, the power of that squinting, reddened stare, were simply too much to bear. “Your blood will unseal Immon’s Gate,” Jikuyin rumbled, “open the way to the throne room of the Dirtlord himself, that pissdrinking King of Worms who took my eye. And when Earthstar is mine, when his great throne is mine, when I wear his mask of yellowed bone, then even if the gods find their way back I will be the greatest of their number!”

You are mad, said Gyir wonderingly. Many in the room heard his silent words: a moan of fear rose up, as though the slaves who could understand him expected to share his punishment.

“There is no madness among gods!” Jikuyin laughed. “How will I be called mad when I can shape everything to my own thoughts? Soon the gate will open, the blood will flow, and then what I speak...will be.”

My blood will dry to powder, to choking dust, before I let you spill so much as a drop in pursuit of this madness.

Jikuyin reached out a giant hand, fingers spreading as though he would crush Gyir to jelly. Instead, he only flicked at him, knocking the Qar warrior into a mass of shrieking prisoners. After those who could escape had scrambled away, the Storm Lantern lay unmoving where he had fallen, his featureless face in the dust.

“Who said it was your blood I wanted, you little whelp of Breeze?” Jikuyin laughed again, a booming roar of satisfaction that threatened to bring down the cavern roof. His hand reached out again, knocking Vansen to the ground, then it folded around Barrick, who let out a thin shriek of surprise and terror before the breath was squeezed out of him. Jikuyin dropped the limp prince among the guards. “Him—the mortal child. I can smell the Fireflower in him. His blood will do nicely.”

Vansen struggled helplessly against the heavy shackles as the guards dragged Barrick toward the looming gate, but they were too tight to slip, too heavy to break. Ferras Vansen let out a howl of grief. Whatever happened, he would certainly die too, but the imminent death of the prince seemed a greater failure, a more horrifying finality.

Something grabbed at his arm. Vansen kicked out and one of the stinking, shaggy guards fell back, but got up immediately and came toward him again. Fighting the inevitable, Vansen managed to land another kick (to even less effect) before he saw that something was strange about the creature’s expression. The apelike face was slack, and the eyes wandered lazily, fixed on nothing, as though the guard were blind. It was also holding a key in its clumsy, clawed hand.

If they want me unshackled before they kill me then it only means I’ll take some of them with me. But why would they want to take that risk? As the creature fumbled roughly with the shackles, he suddenly realized he had seen that befuddled expression before on the creatures Gyir had controlled. Vansen looked to the fairy. The Storm Lantern was staring up into nothingness, squinting so hard in concerntration that his eyes were little more than creases. Another guard stood behind Gyir, doing something with his bonds as well, but even if the fairy was controlling them both, time was running out.

The guards had dragged Prince Barrick to a spot just before the mighty doors which stretched above them higher and wider than the front of the great temple in Southmarch. Ueni’ssoh, the terrible, cadaverous gray man, walked slowly up to stand beside them and raised his skeletal hands in the air.

“O Fire-Eyed, White-Winged, hear us through the empty places!” he intoned in his harsh, unfeeling voice, “O Pale Question, grant us audience!”

Vansen could understand every word, but the tongue was nothing he had ever heard before, as inhuman as the sawing of a cricket: the sound of the gray man’s fluid speech was in Vansen’s ears, all tick and slur, but the meaning was in his head.

“O Emperor of Worms, see us through all darknesses!” Ueni’ssoh sang, “O Empty Box, grant us audience!”

The gray man’s voice now rose, or gained some other power, because it seemed to fill Ferras Vansen’s head like water poured splashing into a bowl, louder and louder until he could scarcely think, although the actual tones seemed as measured and unhurried as before. This was no song of Kerneia that he had ever heard, but Vansen thought he recognized a few words here and there, the ancient words of mourning his grandfather had sung at his grandmother’s grave in the hills, but the gray man’s terrible, flat voice made Ferras Vansen see pictures in his head that had nothing to do with his long-dead grandmother or his father’s burial plot. A crimson-lit world of scuttling shadows filled his thoughts, an end to all things so final and so terrible that it lay on his heart like an immense weight.

The fairy-spelled guard still scrabbled at his shackles. Vansen was not free yet—he could not let the voice overwhelm him. He could not fail.

“See now where the darkness twists in us like a river
It is time to get up and go to the land of the Red Sunlight
The land where the sun sets and does not rise.
“O Burned Foot, let us shelter in your hard folds of shadow
Where we can still see the dying sun until the last day.
Crowfather
Wearer of the Iron Gloves
Husband to the Knot that cannot be Untied
We are frightened,
O King. Open the gate!”

At first, in his terror and confusion, Ferras Vansen thought the massive stone portal was beginning to fade, or to melt away like ice. But no, he realized a moment later, something much stranger was happening: the great doors were swinging inward into shadow, the darkness beyond so absolute that it could smother the stars themselves. Vansen’s heart quailed. His body felt suddenly boneless, limp as an empty sack.

Ferras Vansen, do not despair! The words came like a whisper from the other side of the world, but they gave him back a little of himself. It was Gyir speaking, Gyir in his head, but only faintly. He could feel the fairy’s powers stretched to their utmost as they touched Vansen, Barrick, the guards working at their bonds, and many others Vansen could not even name—Gyir’s will spreading among them in an invisible spiderweb of influence, although the web quivered and sagged now, near its breaking-point. The Storm Lantern’s strength was astonishing, far beyond anything Vansen could have dreamed.

Fight! Gyir demanded. Fight for the boy—fight for your home! I need