Shadowplay

summers again. “You realize, of course, that there isn’t a chance in the world it will ever come to anything?”

“What?”

“Stop pretending to be stupid, Captain. You know what I mean.”

Vansen took a breath. “Of course I do.”

“You like lost causes, don’t you? And thankless favors? I saw you help that disgusting bird to escape, as well.” Barrick smiled at him. It was quite nearly kind. “I see I’m not the only one who has learned to live with hopelessness. It makes an unsatisfying fare, doesn’t it? But after a while, you begin to take a sort of pride in it.” He looked up again. “And speaking of unsatisfying fare, here come our hosts.”

Two Longskulls stood over them, appearing to Vansen like nothing so much as gigantic grasshoppers, although there was something weirdly doglike about them, too. Their legs were similar to men’s, but the back of the foot and the heel were long and did not touch the ground, so that they perched on the front of their feet like upright rats. The eyes sunk deep in their loaf-shaped, bony heads did not exactly glisten with intelligence, but it was obvious they were not mere beasts, either. One made a little honking, gabbling noise and ladled something out of the bucket the other was holding. It pointed at Vansen’s hands, then honked again.

I am living in a world of firelight tales, Vansen thought suddenly, remembering his father’s old sea stories and his mother’s accounts of the fairies that lived in the hills. We are captives in some unhappy child’s dream.

He held out his arms, showing the guards his shackles. “I cannot hold anything,” he said. The Longskull merely turned the ladle upside down and let the mass of cold pottage drop into his hands. It did the same for Barrick, then moved on to the next group.

In the end, he found he could eat only by bracing the heavy shackles on the ground, then crouching over his own outstretched hands, lapping up the tasteless vegetable pulp like a dog eating from a bowl.

When all the prisoners had been fed the watery pottage, the Longskull guards returned to the fire to eat their own food, which had been roasting on spits. Vansen could not see what they ate, but when the prisoners were hauled to their feet a short time later and set to marching again, he noticed the Longskulls hanging some empty shackles back on the massive wagon that held the slavers’ simple belongings, and where they swung, clinking, as the wagon began to roll.

If Barrick had thought the Twilight Lands oppressive before, every miserable step of the forced march now seemed to take him into deeper and deeper gloom. It wasn’t simply that the pall of smoke they thought they had escaped grew thicker above them with every step, turning the land dark as midnight and making breathing a misery, or even the dull horror of their predicament. No something even beyond these things was afflicting him, although Barrick could not say exactly what it was. Every step they took, even when they reached an old road and the going became easier, seemed to plunge them deeper into a queer malevolence he could feel in his very bones.

He asked Gyir about it. The fairy-warrior, who seemed almost as despondent as his companions, said, Yes, I feel it, even despite the blindness my wounds have caused, but I do not know what causes it. Jikuyin is the source of some of it—but not all.

Barrick was struck by a thought. Will this blindness of yours get better? Will the illness or whatever it is leave you?

I do not know. It has never before happened to me. Gyir made a sign with his long, graceful fingers that Barrick did not recognize. In any case, I truthfully do not think we will live long enough to find out.

Why are we prisoners? Is Jikuyin at war with your king? Only in that he does not bow to him. Only in that Jikuyin is old and cruel and our king is less cruel. But we are prisoners, I think, only because we were captured. Look at those around us... He gestured to the slow-stepping band of prisoners on either side and stretching before and behind them farther than Barrick could throw a stone. We may be rare things here, Gyir told him in his wordless way, but these others are as common as the trees and stones. No, we are all being taken to the same place, but the more I consider, the less I think it is because we were singled out. He opened his eyes wide, something Barrick had come to recognize as a sign of determination. But I think these creatures’ master will take notice of us when he sees us. If nothing else, he will wonder what mortals are doing again in his lands.

Again? I have never heard of him.

Jikuyin first made this place his own long, long before mortals roamed this country and built Northmarch, but he was injured in a great battle, and so after the Years of Blood he slept for a long time, healing his wounds. His name was lost to most memories, except for a few old stories. We drove the mortals out of Northmarch before he returned. That was only a very short time ago by our count. After they had fled we called down the Mantle to keep your kind away thereafter, banishing them from these lands for good and all.

Why did you do that?

Why? Because you would have come creeping back into our country from all sides as you did before, like maggots! Gyir narrowed his eyes, making crimson slits. You had already killed most of us and stolen our ancient lands! Not me, Barrick told him. My kind, yes. But not me.

Gyir stared, then turned away. Your pardon. I forgot to whom I spoke.

The procession was just emerging from between two hills and into a shallow valley and a great stony shadow across the road—an immense, ruined gate.

“By The Holy Book of the Trigon!” Barrick breathed. No oaths like that—not here, Gyir warned him sharply. But...what is this?

The column of prisoners had shuffled to a weary halt. Those who still had the strength stared up at two massive pillars which flanked the road, lumps of vine-netted gray stone that despite being broken still loomed taller than the trees. Even the smaller lintel that stretched above their heads was as long as a tithing barn. Huge, overgrown walls, half standing, half tumbled, hemmed the crumbling gate like the wings of some god’s headdress.

It is worse than I feared. The fairy’s thoughts were suddenly faint as a superstitious whisper, hard for Barrick to grasp.

Jikuyin has left his lair in Northmarch and made himself a new home...in Greatdeeps itself. This is its outer gate.

“What is this new misery?” Ferras Vansen was clearly feeling the strangeness of the place too, not just its size and immense age but even the hidden something that pressed ever more intrusively into Barrick’s mind like cold, heavy fingers.

“Gyir says it was something called Greatdeeps, or at least the first gate.”

“Greatdeeps?” Vansen frowned. “I think I know that name. From when I was a child...”

The Longskulls came hissing angrily down the line, poking and prodding, and at last even the most reluctant prisoners let themselves be driven under the massive lintel. It was carved with strange, inhuman faces that looked down on them as they passed—some with too few eyes, some with too many, none of them pleasant to see.

What lay beyond was equally disturbing. The wide, brokencobbled road dipped down into a valley that lay almost hidden beneath a thick cloud of smoky fog as it wound between two rows of huge stone sculptures. Some of the stonework portrayed ordinary things cast in giant size, like anvils big as houses or hammers and other tools that a dozen mortals together could never have lifted. Other shapes were not quite so recognizable, queer representations of machinery Barrick had never seen and the uses of which he could not even guess. All the statues were old, cracked by wind and rain and the work of creepers and other plants. Many had fallen and been partially buried by dirt and leaves, so that the impression was that monstrous citizens who had once dwelled here had simply packed up one night and left, allowing the mighty road to fall to ruin after they were gone.

Despite the apparent emptiness, or perhaps because of it, Barrick’s sense of oppression grew as they trudged forward. Even the Longskull guards grew quiet, their gabbling little more than a murmur as they moved up and down the line of prisoners, goading them forward.

What is this place? he asked Gyir. What is Greatdeeps?

The place where the gods first broke the earth, searching... A tennight before this Barrick had not quite believed in the gods. Now, in a place like this, the mere word set his heart racing, brought