Shadowplay

showed no such compunction as it passed him. Vansen groaned and climbed down to clear the trail. He was pushing one of the bodies with his sword, hesitant to touch any of the creatures, when the thing abruptly came to life. Whistling in a horrid way that Vansen only realized later was the mortal slash across its chest sucking air, it managed to climb up his sword and sink its teeth into his arm before he could do more than grunt in shock. He had thought many times of removing his mail shirt—the damp cold had made it seem much more a burden than a benefit—but now he thanked the gods he had kept it. The creature’s teeth did not pierce the Funderling-forged rings, and he was able to smash its wizened face hard enough to dislodge it from his arm. It hit the ground but did not run away, scuttling toward him again, still whistling like a hillman’s pipes with the sack burst.

“Barrick!” he shouted, wondering how many more of the creatures might be still alive and lurking, “Highness, help me!”—but the prince was already out of sight down the trail.

Vansen backed away from his horse, not wanting to risk wounding it with a wild swing, and as the little monstrosity leaped up toward his throat he managed to strike it with the flat of his blade, knocking it aside. His heavy sword was not the best weapon, but he did not dare take the time to pull his dagger. Before the hissing thing could get up again he stepped forward and skewered it against the wet ground with his sword, pushing through muscle and gut and crunching bone until his hilt was almost in reach of the creature’s claws, which waved feebly a few times, then curled in death.

Vansen took only a moment to catch his breath and wipe his blade on the wet grass before clambering back up into the saddle, worried about the prince but also irritated. Hadn’t the boy heard him call?

He found Barrick just a short ride ahead, dismounted and staring down at a dozen or more of the hairy creatures, all apparently safely dead this time. In their midst lay a dead horse with its throat torn out and what Vansen at first thought was its equally dead rider lying facedown beside it. The black-haired body was human enough in shape, wrapped in a torn dark cloak and armor of some strange material with a blue-gray tortoiseshell- like finish. Vansen dismounted and cautiously put his hand on the back of the corpse’s neck, in a gap between helmet and armor. To his surprise he could feel movement under his fingers—a slow, labored rise: the rider was breathing. When he turned the victim over and pulled off the disturbing skull helm, he got his second shock. The man had no face.

No, he realized after an instant, still sickened, it does—but that’s no human face. He made the sign of the Three as he fought against a sudden clutch of nausea. There were eyes in that pale, membrane of flesh that stretched between scalp and narrow chin, but because they were shut they had seemed no more than creases of flesh beneath the wide brow, obscured by smears of blood from what looked like a near-mortal gash in the thing’s forehead—the blood, at least, was as red as that which flowed in a godly man. But the rest of the face was as featureless as a drumskin, with no nose or mouth.

The faceless man’s eyes flicked open, eyes red as his smeared blood. They struggled to fix on the guard captain and the prince, then rolled up and the waxy lids fell again.

Vansen staggered to his feet in revulsion and fear. “It is one of them. One of the murdering Twilight People.”

“He belongs to my mistress,” Barrick said calmly. “He wears her mark.”

“What?”

“He is injured. See to him. We will stop here.” Barrick climbed down from his horse and stood waiting, as though what he had said made perfect sense.

“Forgive me, Highness, but what are you thinking? This is one of the demons who has tried to kill us—tried to kill you. They have destroyed our armies and our towns.” Vansen sheathed his sword and slipped his dagger from its battered sheath. “No, step back and I will slit his gorge. It is a more merciful death than many of our folk have received...”

“Stop.” Prince Barrick moved forward as if to put his own body between the wounded creature and the killing stroke. Ferras Vansen could only stare in astonishment. Barrick’s eyes were calm and intent—in fact, he seemed closer to his old self than he had since they had crossed the Shadowline—but he was still acting like a madman.

“Highness, please, I beg of you, stand away. This thing is a murderer of our people. I saw this very creature killing Aldritchmen and Kertewallers like a dog among rats. I cannot let him live.”

“No, you must let him live,” Barrick declared. “He is on a grave errand.”

“What? What errand?”

“I do not know. But I know the signs upon him and I hear the voices they make in my head. If we do not help him, more of...our kind will die. Mortals.” The young prince regent’s hesitation was strange, as if for a moment he had forgotten to which side of the conflict he belonged.

“But how can you know that? And who is this ‘mistress’ you speak of? Not your sister, surely. Princess Briony would not want you to do any of these things.”

Barrick shook his head. “Not my sister, no. The great lady who found me and commanded me. She is one of the highest. She looked at me and...and knew me. Now help him, please.” For a moment the prince’s gaze became even clearer, but a hard look of pain and loss came too, like ice forming on a shallow pond. “I do not...do not know what to do. How to do it. You must.”

Vansen stared at Barrick. Barrick stared back. The boy would not let him kill this monster without a fight, he’d made that clear. Vansen had already tried several times to sway Barrick from these strange, spellbound moods but had found no way to do it without harming him, so fierce was his resistance. It would be bad enough to face Briony Eddon if he allowed the boy to come to harm—how much worse if it was Vansen himself who hurt the prince?

He cursed under his breath and sheathed his sword, then began to remove the creature’s strange shell-like armor, which, considering the cold, wet day, was warmer to the touch than if it had been metal or anything else decent.

Cursed black magic—I should never have come here again. Every hour, it seemed, some new and unwholesome choice was put before him. Instead of a soldier, I should have been a king’s poison-taster, he thought bleakly. At least then I wouldn’t have survived to see the outcome of my failures.

He had been adrift in the depths of his own being for so long that only now, as he was finally nearing the surface again, did Barrick Eddon begin to understand how completely he had been lost.

From the moment that the fairy-woman’s eye had caught and held his own he had lost the sequence of everything.

From that astounding instant when he had lain stunned and helpless as the giant’s club had swung up but death had not followed, all the moments of his life, strung in ordered sequence like Kanjja pearls on a necklace, had suddenly flown apart, as if someone had broken the string and dumped those precious pearls into swirling water. His childhood, his dreams, barely recognized faces and even all the moments of Briony and his father and family, the army of Shadowline demons, a million more glittering instants, had all become discontinuous and simultaneous, and Barrick had floated among them like a drowning man watching his own last bubbles.

In fact, for a while the most clear-thinking part of him had been certain he was dead, that the giant’s club had fallen, that the spiky porcupine woman and her fierce, all-knowing gaze had been nothing but a last momentary glimpse of the living world before it was torn from him, a glimpse which had expanded into an entire, shadowy imitation of life, another bubble to observe, another loose pearl.

Now he knew better—now he could think again. But even though he could feel the wind and rain on his face once more, even though he again had a sense of life unrolling moment by moment instead of surrounding him in a disordered whirl, it was all still very strange.

For one thing, although he could no longer remember the important thing the fairy-woman had told him, he knew that he could no more go against her wishes than he could sprout wings and fly away, just as he had known that her servant, the faceless one they had discovered, must be saved.

But how could it be that someone could command him and he could not say the reason or remember the command?

Even the few things in his life that had once given Barrick comfort now seemed distant—his home, his family, his pastimes, the things he had clung to throughout his youth, when he had often feared he would go mad. But at this moment, of all of it, only Briony still seemed entirely real— she was in his heart and it seemed now that not