Shadowplay

as firmly, and those shapes retreated, too.

Finally they came to a wide, empty land where the dust blew always and the wind was fierce, a place where they could walk no faster than a dying man could crawl. At times in that place his father faltered and Vansen had to pull him along through the stinging, smothering dust. Once, when even the twilight was blotted out by thick clouds and they trudged forward in complete darkness, the old man fell and could not get up. As he lay, croaking a song about white bracelets and hearts of smoke, Ferras Vansen crouched beside him in despair. He knew that he could rise and walk away and the old man would not see him go, would never even realize he was gone. Instead he staggered to his feet, then bent and lifted the old man onto his back. Pedar Vansen’s body had no more substance than a woman’s veil, but somehow he was also heavier than a great stone, and Vansen could walk only a few steps each time before he had to stop to catch his breath.

At last the dust storms subsided. They were still in the empty land, the gray expanses, but for the first time he saw something on the horizon other than more nothingness. It was a house—a hut, really, a crude thing made of sticks and unworked stones, its crevices mortared with what looked like centuries of dust, so it seemed the mound of some tremendous and slovenly insect. A man stood in front of it, leaning on his long staff like one of the Kertish herders who had sometimes come to live in Ferras Vansen’s dales when driven out by a tribal feud back home.

There! It was a triumphant moment, overshadowing even the sight of another being in this endless, dust-choked void. He had remembered something new: I am Ferras Vansen —a man of the dales.

The stranger wore the kind of ragged cloth around his belly that the ancients had worn, but was otherwise without ornament. His long beard was gray as cobweb beside his mouth, but dust had turned the rest of it yellow. He did not move but only watched them approach, and Vansen and his father’s ghost had almost reached him before Ferras Vansen realized this bearded apparition was the first being he had seen in these lands for as long as he could remember whose eyes were open—the first who was not asleep.

Who are you? Vansen said to him. Or is it forbidden to ask?

The man’s eyes seemed bright as stars beneath his bristling brows. He smiled, but there was no kindness in it, or malice either. You stand before the last river, but the place you wish to go does not exist in this Age of Sleep. You must cross instead to another side, one in which those great ones you wish to see are still in their houses to be seen.

I don’t understand, Vansen told the bearded man. As they spoke, his father sat down in the dust and began singing to himself.

You do not need to understand. You need only do what you must. Whether you come through again afterward is in the hands of greater powers than mine. The dusty old man shifted his bare feet, the spread, leathery toes of someone who had never worn shoes. Unlike Vansen’s father, he was as real as could be—Ferras Vansen could see every inch of his coppery skin with great clarity, every scar, every hair.

You will not tell me who you are, Master?

The bearded man shook his head. Not a master—certainly not yours. A shape, an idea, perhaps even a word. That is all. Now step through the door. You will find water there. Both of you must wash yourselves.

And without knowing how it happened, Ferras Vansen found himself on the inside of the small wooden hut, but here for the first time they had left the twilight behind: what he could see through the cracks in the walls was velvet black sky and the gleam of stars. He stepped closer to the walls and peered through one of the openings. The entire hut was surrounded by stars, innumerable white sparks flickering like the candles of all the gods in heaven— stars above, beside, and even below them, as though the hut floated untethered through the night sky. Dizzied by the enthralling, terrifying view, he turned to see his father already washing himself with the water from a simple wooden tub as crude as the hut itself.

Vansen joined him, and for long moments lost himself in the glory of water running down his skin. He had forgotten he even had a body, and this was a wonderful way to be reminded. Even his father’s phantom, no more substantial than if he were made of spiderwebs, seemed to have come close to something like happiness.

I should have come home, Vansen said. I feared you, Tati. I feared your suffering. And I hated you, at least a little. Because you did not make it easy for me, when you could have.

His father broke off his singing and for a long time did not say anything. He stood up straight and let the water slide off him like rain dripping down a window.

I was a prisoner of my own understanding, Pedar Vansen said at last. At least that is what I imagine. In truth, I cannot remember—it is all gone, drifted away like smoke... And then, before Vansen could hear any more of these words that came to him like food to a starving man, they were out of the hut again, returned to the twilight and dust. The bearded man stood leaning on his long staff, a length of wood as gnarled and knobbed as the ancient man himself. There, the bearded man said, pointing at a pile of dull, red-orange stones lying in the dust. Crumble them and rub yourself with it so you may cross into the last sunset light and still retain something of yourself. Both of you. There is no difference now between living and dead in this house—all are subject to the same laws.

Vansen rubbed the red rocks together, scraping them into blood-colored powder, rubbing that powder onto his clean skin. Instead of rubbing dirt onto himself, it seemed instead as though he rubbed himself with light. When he finished, he gleamed, and even his father’s phantom shimmered beneath its layer of dust and seemed more substantial.

This ocher gives life to the unloving, said the old, bearded man. And it protects the living from the dead in the place you go to now, who would otherwise cover you like flies on honey. Go.

What waits for us? Vansen called back to the ancient as he and his father walked forward.

What has always waited for you. What always will wait for you and for me, and for everything. The end of all.

And then the bearded man was gone, lost in the dust which had begun to swirl around them once more, billowing, choking. Vansen held in his breath, then a time came when he could not hold it any longer. He breathed and the river of dust entered him. He became the dust. He passed through.

And now they entered the true city, the metropolis beside which the City of Sleepers was no more than a village. The oracles say that this greatest and most awful of habitations fills the earth from pole to pole, so that everywhere living men walk, beneath their feet lie the streets of the City of the Red Sun. Nobody laughs in that city, the oracles also claim, and nobody cries except in thin, almost silent sobs, or sings above a whisper.

As Ferras Vansen and his father entered, a hush lay upon the place like dust lay in the streets. The sleepers all had open eyes, and every face stared hopelessly into eternity. Each step forward felt as though he lifted a hundredweight of stone. Each street seemed as bleak and empty and comfortless as the one before.

Always, though, he and his father’s shade moved toward the great, dark lodestone at the heart of the city, the palace of the Earthlord himself. Thousands of other phantoms moved with them toward the mighty black gate, shadowpeople of every kind and every shape. Few wore more than rags, and many were naked, but even in their nakedness some were clothed in feathers or dully gleaming scales, so that they did not look quite like people. Vansen and his father were swept along in this silent crowd like bits of bark on a slow-moving river, the gate and the wall and the palace growing always larger before them.

Ferras Vansen looked at his father, who of all the dead throng still had closed eyes, and saw that although the old man’s features were still indistinct as smoke, his father had retained something of the glow of the ocher, a red gleam like fire reflected on silver. Then he saw that the other spirits had it too, and that the glow did not come from the dead themselves but from the great palace, whose every window spilled sunset-red light.

The House of the Ultimate West, his father whispered, but as though he recited a prayer instead of explaining something. Raven’s Nest. The Castle of Everything-FallsApart. The Great Pine Tree... But first, someone whispered, we must pass the Gate of the Pig. These words traveled through the crowd like a fire through dry grass, the whisper becoming a hissing murmur. The Gate. The Gate. They were groaning the words, some of them,