Shadowplay

brings one of the Encauled so close to my adopted kingdom? What is this lawful business of which you speak?”

“We are riding home to the House of the People, but were driven out of our way. Why should you interfere?”

Now that Jack Chain’s voice no longer rattled his bones with each utterance, Vansen slowly began to lift himself from the ground. He ached as if he had been beaten, but if he was going to die he would do his best to meet that death standing, as a soldier of Southmarch. The dusty stone beneath him was splotched with red; he lifted his hands to his face and realized his nose was streaming blood.

“Interfere? You trespass on my land, little hobgoblin, and then claim I have interfered with you?” The monstrous, one-eyed creature lolled on his statue-throne, his splayed legs longer than Vansen was tall, the handsome, ruined head as big as a temple bell. Jikuyin was smiling down at a small figure standing before him—Gyir the Storm Lantern.

“I am on the king’s business,” said Gyir’s voice.

By the Three, Vansen thought, I can understand him! He was as astonished by this as everything else that had happened to them. I can hear him in my head now, just as the prince can!

He turned to tell Barrick, but was horrified to see the boy lying on his side with blood running from his nose and ears. Vansen threw himself down beside him and was only slightly relieved to feel the rise and fall of Barrick’s chest.

“He is hurt!” Vansen shouted. “Help him, you god or whatever you are—it was your great barking voice that did this to him!”

Jikuyin laughed long and hard; the sound rolled and crashed in Vansen’s skull like untethered barrels slamming in the hold of a storm-tossed ship. “Help him! I like you, little mortal—you are very amusing! But like the fly on the horse’s back who tells his host which way to go, you have a flawed notion of your own importance.” He turned his single eye on Gyir. “As for you, slave of the Fireflower, I do not know how one of the Encauled could let himself be taken unawares—and by Longskulls, no less...!” The godthing chortled, and several of the other prisoners in the great room laughed, too, if not with the same heartiness as their master. “But it signifies nothing, in any case. You will be part of my great work.” Jikuyin grinned, showing the true horror of his ruined mouth and shattered teeth. He stroked the chains across his chest, making the severed heads sway. “And even if you cannot help me in any profound way, you will at least, as I promised, prove ornamental.”

The giant stood then for the first time, and even though Ferras Vansen had thought himself full to sickening with strange miracles, it was a horrible, astonishing sight: Jikuyin was so tall that his great head seemed to rise into the heights of the chamber like the pockfaced mooon, beyond the reach of the torches and lanterns, until much of it had passed into shadow and only the lower, broken half could be seen.

“Take them away,” he rumbled. A host of shapes scurried forward from the dark edges of the massive room—the guard-Followers, man-sized and heavier than the Longskulls, with stubs of sharp bone poking through their matted pelts and small piggy eyes glinting like coals. “Give them to the gray one and tell him to keep them safe until I need them.”

Gyir stood firm as the red-eyed things began to surround him, and clearly would have fought, but one of the apelike creatures had already stolen up behind him unseen. It hit Gyir in the back of the head with its massive fist and the Storm Lantern was pulled down and dragged away.

Vansen was too weak to resist. All he could do was try to keep a hand on Barrick’s unmoving form as they were carried out of Jikuyin’s throne room by the bristly, foulsmelling creatures. As they were roughly hurried down what seemed an endless succession of lightless tunnels he struggled against his heavy shackles, doing his best to cling to the prince so that they would not be separated, as a mother who has fallen into a river with her child will still keep a hand clenched on the infant’s garment even after death has stolen away her breath.

Even in the center of his own great house, the fortress that had been given to his family from the gods’ own hands, the blind king Ynnir dina’at sen-Qin, Guardian of the Fireflower, Lord of Winds and Thought, could not simply walk to the Deathwatch Chamber. First the Guard of Elementals must be supplicated, allowed to perform their warlike rites in his honor, and in honor of the one they were protecting—the Salute of the Bone Knife, the Song of the Owl’s Eye (blessedly shorter in these latter days, thanks to an edict by Ynnir’s own grandfather: once the chant would have lasted an entire day), and the Arrow Count. When all these duties were finished and the Guard- Commander of the Elementals had removed his helmet in salute—even without sight, Ynnir always found that part difficult—the king moved on.

The Celebrants of Mother Night did not perform official duties, but they had been allowed to make their camp of suffering outside the Deathwatch Chamber. Merely to move among them, to hear their moaning and weeping and feel the naked misery of their grief, was like walking through biting winds and needle-sharp sleet. Pale Daughter herself, fleeing her lover’s house with an infant godling in her belly, could have felt nothing more chillingly painful.

It was a relief, after a time that felt like days, to pass out of the chambers where the Celebrants shrieked and tore at themselves and into the silence of the final antechamber, to face Zsan-san-sis, the ancient chieftain of the Children of the Emerald Fire. Zsan-san-sis had returned from the underground pools in which he had spent more and more time as he aged; it was a measure of the crisis that he should appoint himself the final guardian of the Deathwatch Chamber when it was only one of his young grandnephews who stood watch outside the Hall of Mirrors itself.

“Moonlight and Sunlight,” said the king.

“And thus roll the days of the Great Defeat unto Time’s sleep,” said the other, completing the ceremonial greeting. “I bid Your Majesty welcome.” His tone seemed even more curt than usual, the glow from inside his ceremonial robe dim and noncommittal, so that his mask was almost invisible in the shadowed hood. The king had always had trouble reading the moods of Zsan-san-sis, as if his own sightlessness and the Emerald Fire chieftain’s silver mask were impediments as real to him as they would be to a mortal. The Children had long favored the queen’s cause, although the old chieftain had been the most conciliatory of his clan. In days past Ynnir had often wondered what would happen when Zsan-san-sis eventually sank to the bottom of his pool and did not surface again, a day when someone less willing to compromise might rise to lead the Emerald Fire Children. Now it no longer seemed to matter. “How is she today?”

“I have not gone in to her, Majesty. I feel her, but barely—a breath faint as a whisper from Silent Hill.” His thoughts and words both—for they came to the king as a single thing— were clouded with regret and resignation. “Even were we to triumph, Majesty, she could never travel now. She would die before we left our own lands.”

Ynnir brought his open hand to his chest, then spread his fingers, a gesture called Significance Incomplete. “We can only wait and be patient, old one, hard as that is. Many threads still remain unbroken.”

“I would not have spent my last seasons this way,” said Zsan-san-sis. “Holding together what is broken, knowing that my daughter’s daughter’s daughters will bear their young in pools without light.”

Ynnir shook his head. “We all do what we can. You have done more than most. This defeat was authored when Time began—all we do not know is the hour of its coming.” “Who could not say with certainty that it is upon us?”

“I could not.” Ynnir said it gently, letting it pass to the ancient guardian with an undertone of spring, of hope, of renewal even after death. “Neither should you. Do as you have always done—do as your broodsire raised you. We will face it bravely, and who knows? We may yet be surprised.”

Zsan-san-sis’ glow guttered for a moment, then burned more strongly. “You are more king than your father was, or his father before him,” he said.

“I am my father, and his father before him,” said the blind king. “But I thank you.”

He did not clasp the old chieftain’s hand—it would be unwise even for the king to touch one of the Children of the Emerald Fire—but he nodded his head so slowly it might almost have been a bow. He left the robed guardian in a posture of surprise as he walked into the Deathwatch Chamber.

The beetles on the walls shifted minutely as he entered and the movement of their iridescent wingcases sent a ripple of changing colors across the entire chamber. They settled again; the flickers of blue and pale green