Shadowplay

were replaced by an earthier tone that better reflected the gray and peach of the cloud-wreathed sunset outside the open window. Blind for centuries, Ynnir could smell the sea as powerfully as a drowning man could taste it, and he hoped that his sisterwife could smell it too, that it gave her a little relief in the growing dark.

He stood over the bed and looked at her, so wan, so still. It had been a full turning of the seasons since she could even bear to be sat up in Hall of Mirrors like some obscene, floppy icon. He was almost grateful that those humiliating days had passed, that she had slipped down into herself so far that she could not even be moved.

Even as he stared in silent contemplation he realized he saw no traces of life at all. Alarmed, he looked to her lips, the pink now paler than ever, almost white, and felt a moment of real fear. Always before, even on the worst days, she had greeted him before he spoke. So still...!

My queen, he called to her, shaping each word so clearly that he could imagine it as a stone dropped into a still pond, the ripples sending everything that swam beneath them scattering, until the stone itself struck into the softness at the bottom. Can you hear me? My twin?

Despite all that had gone between them, the fair and the foul, his heart leaped in his breast when he at last heard her words, as quiet as if they did indeed issue from beneath the mud at the bottom of a deep, deep pond.

Husband?

I am here, at your bedside. How are you today?

Weaker. I...I can barely hear you. I sent my words to Yasammez. She did not think the name, but rather a flutter of ideas—Grandmother’s Fierce Beautiful Sister of the Bloodletting Thorns and the Smoking Eye. I should not have done it, she told him, almost an apology. I did not have the...strength...but I was... Afraid she would use up what little of her music remained, he hastened to finish her thought. You were wondering if she had succeeded. And she told you she had.

Succeeded at your plan. Fulfilled the Pact. Not at what I wished... Which would have availed you nothing. Trust me, my sister, my wife. Many things have passed between us over all these years, but never lies. And it could yet be my own compromised plan, like the despised, bent tree in the corner of the orchard, that will bear fruit.

What would it matter? There is nothing that can be done now. All that we love will perish. Her thoughts were so full of blackness he could almost feel himself pulled down by them, like a man so fixed on the swirling clouds below his mountain path that he leans toward them and falls free... No. He pulled himself back, disentangling himself from her. Hope is the only strength left to us and I will not give it up.

What hope? For me? I...doubt it. And even if so, then what of you...? He sensed her amusement, that old, bitter mirth that sometimes over the long centuries had felt to him like a slow poison. What of you, Ynnirit-so?

I ask for nothing I cannot bear. And Yasammez has given the glass to her dearest, closest servitor, Gyir.

The Encauled One? But he is so young in years...!

He will bring it to us. He will stop for nothing—he knows its importance. Do not despair, my queen. Do not go down into the darkness yet. Things may change.

Things always change, she told him, that is the nature of things... but she was fading now, weary and in need of that deeper blackness that was her sleep, and which might last days. A last bubble of dark amusement drifted up to him.

Things always change, but never for the better. Are we not the People, and is that not the substance of all our story?

Then her thoughts were gone and he stood alone with her silent, coolly slumbering shell. The beetles shifted on the walls again, a quiet unfurling and resettling of wings that rippled sunset-colored lightning all around the chamber until they too settled down to sleep once more.

They were back.

The dark men, the faceless men, once more pursued him through burning halls, sliding in and out of the rippling shadows as though they were nothing but shadows themselves. Was it a nightmare? Another fever dream? Why couldn’t he wake up?

Where am I? The tapestries curled and smoked. Southmarch. He knew the look of its corridors as completely as he knew the sound and feel of his own blood rushing through his veins. So had all the rest been a dream? Those endless hours in the dripping forest behind the Shadowline? Gyir and Vansen, and that bellowing, oneeyed giant—had they all been fever-fancy?

He ran, gasping and clumsy, and the faceless men in black oozed behind him like something that had been melted and poured, losing bodily form as they flowed around corners and snaked along the walls in sideways drips and smears only to regain shape once more, a dozen shapes, and spring out after him, heads following his every movement, fingers spreading and reaching. But even as he ran for his life, even as the tapestries flamed and now even the roofbeams began to smolder, he felt his thoughts float free, light and insubstantial as the flakes of ash swirling around him on hot winds.

Who am I? What am I?

He was coming apart, fragmenting like a kori-doll on an Eril’s Night bonfire, his limbs flailing but useless, his head a thing of straw, dry tinder, full of sparks.

Who am I? What am I?

Something to hold—he needed something cool as a stone, thick and hard as bone, something real to keep himself from falling into flaming pieces. He ran and it was as though he grew smaller with every step. He was losing himself, all that made him up charring, disappearing. The rush and thump of the faceless men’s pursuit echoed in his head as if he were listening to his own blood coursing through the gutters of his body, his own filthy, corrupted blood.

I’m like Father—worse. It burns in me—it burns me up!

And it hurt like the most dreadful thing he could imagine, like needles under his skin, like white-hot metal in his marrow, and it shifted with every movement, driving bolts of pain from joint to joint, rushing up into his head like fire exploding from a cannon’s barrel. He wanted only to get away from it, but how? How could you run away from your own blood?

Briony. If Southmarch itself was no longer his home, if its passageways were full of fire and angry shadows and the galleries hung with leering, alien faces, his sister was something different. She would help him. She would hold him, remember him, know him. She would tell him his name —he missed it so much!—and put her cool hand on his head, and then he would sleep. If only he could find Briony the faceless men would not find him—they would give up and scuttle, slide, ooze back into the shadows, at least for a while. Briony. His twin. Where was she?

“Briony!” he shouted, then he screamed it: “Briony! Help me!”

Stumbling then, and falling; a bolt of pain shooting through him as he struck his injured arm—how could this be a dream when it felt so real? He scrabbled to lift himself from the hot stone, arm aching worse than even the burning of the skin on his hands. He could not stop, could not rest, not until he found his sister. If he stopped he would die, he knew that beyond doubt. The shadow-men would eat him from within.

He stood, even in this dream world forced to cradle his throbbing, aching arm, that thing he carried through his life like a sickly child, loving it and hating it. He looked around. A vast, empty room stretched away on all sides, dark but for a few slanting columns of light falling down from the high windows—the Portrait Hall, and it was empty but for him, he could feel it. The faceless men had not caught him yet, but he could smell smoke and sense the growing murmur of their pursuit. He could not stop here.

A picture hung before him, one he had seen before but seldom paid much attention to—some ancient queen whose name he could not remember. Briony would know. She always knew things like that, his beloved show-off sister. But there was something about the woman’s eyes, her cloud of hair, that caught his attention... The sound of his pursuers rose until it seemed they were just beyond the Portrait Hall door, but he stood transfixed, because it was not the face of some ancient Eddon pictured there, some long-dead queen of Southmarch, but his own, his features haggard with fear and terror.