Shadowplay

you two done?” the boy demanded of Vansen. “He won’t tell me.” Vansen had no doubt the prince was speaking aloud to irritate Gyir, and couldn’t help wondering if the boy’s father had ever simply taken Barrick over his knee and given him a good thrashing.

“I couldn’t tell you, Highness, because I didn’t understand it myself.”

I have asked several times for silence. I will not ask again. Gyir’s brow wrinkled, which was his way of frowning. Listen. Outside their tiny cell Vansen could hear the growling of the guards and the moans and shrills of protesting prisoners.

They are harrying the next gang out to work and I must... narrow my thoughts. Deepen them. I am going to look through the eyes of one of them—the yellow one that Captain Vansen saw. I will see what he does, where he goes, and discover something of this place.

Vansen was puzzled. But I thought you were...crippled, you said. By what those Followers did to you.

I have recovered, somewhat. In fact, I think my recovery was caused, or at least hastened, by being in the presence of Jikuyin, battered by his voice. It would be nice to think that in capturing and imprisoning us, he has unwittingly given me back something of myself. He paused, clearly listening to something Barrick was saying.

I do not know if I have the strength, Gyir said at last. Then: Very well, you may be right. I will try. But if I grow too weak, I will cut the rope, as it were, and let the two of you fall away rather than give up my own connection.

What does that mean? Try what? Vansen asked, careful not to speak aloud again.

The young prince wants me to let you both see what I see through the eyes of the prisoner.

Can you really do that?

The fairy sat down with his back against the door, then beckoned Vansen and the prince toward him. Take my hands and close your eyes, shut out all distraction. He extended one long hand toward Vansen and the other toward Barrick, palms up, white fingers curled like the petals of water flowers. Go—take it.

Vansen did and was bemused to find nothing different, other than the obviously strange situation of holding the fairy’s chill, smooth hand.

No, you must shut out distraction. If you look around, if you squirm, if you even think too much, you make it more difficult for me to hold everything in my thoughts.

Vansen did his best to comply. At first he saw nothing except the floating sparks that usually populated the darkness behind closed lids. Then one of the sparks began to grow, its glow swelling, until it pushed out the blackness and filled his mind’s eye.

It was more than just sight, though, he realized as the great door swung open before him and he followed the small, hairy back of another prisoner out into the passageway. He thought he could even feel something of the yellow creature’s thoughts, although they were as strange to him as trying to hear meaning in birdsong. The thing he was inhabiting longed helplessly for home, an ache Vansen understood, but “home” to this creature seemed to mean deep woods and tangling leaves and the silver of snailtracks undisturbed on a damp forest floor. The thing had a name, too—something like “Praise-Sweet-Lisiya’s-Grace,” as far as Vansen could tell. It was terribly frightened, but had dissolved its fear in a passivity he could not understand, a certainty that nothing would change or even could change, that it could only follow what was before it, from meal to miserable meal and from one command to the next, unless something came at last to change this nightmare, even if that something was death itself.

It was a chilling way to feel, worse still to experience such hopelessness as if it were his own. Vansen did not try to sample any of the river of memories that ran just beneath the slow, awkward thoughts. He wanted only to get out of the creature’s thoughts entirely, as quickly as he could—he hated being in this trapped, pathetic, doomed thing...!

Something wrapped around him, soothing him as a parent would a child. It was Gyir, acting not out of pity, but because Vansen’s discomfort was affecting the fairy’s own composure. Vansen felt a wash of shame and did his best to choke down his discomfort and fear. Just watch, he told himself. Be strong. It’s not me. This thing is not me. But it was more frightening than he would ever have guessed to be trapped in someone else’s body.

The line of prisoners trudged downward through several sloping corridors and once down a flight of spiral steps so long that Vansen feared he would soon be seeing the face of Immon the immortal gatekeeper. In these depths they could better hear the thunderous sounds that had rumbled up to the prisoner chamber. They were not constant, or even regular, but every hundred dragging steps or so a loud thump seemed to rattle the very stone around them.

They passed dozens of the hairy guards and hundreds of other prisoners returning from the depths, most of the groups as queerly mixed as their own, but some more obviously collected for a certain limited task, like the group of short, heavy-muscled creatures with heads sunk deep between their huge shoulders, each one carrying a bronze pick like a spearman marching to war. The most chilling thing about these squat diggers was not their silence or their faintly luminous, mushroom-colored skin, but the absence of eyes in the crude faces nestling just above their breastbones.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs at last, the guards marched the yellow fairy and his companions through a few more corridors and down one last slope, then through a heavy wooden door. A wheeled cart the size of a large hay wain stood untended in a chamber slightly bigger than the one in which the prisoners were housed, its wheels sunk deep into tracks through what looked like centuries worth of dust. At the far end of the chamber was an open door large enough for the cart to pass through, with only darkness visible behind. At the near end of the room a shaft led straight down, with a system of large pulleys strung above it and ropes cobwebbing down into the measureless depths.

Vansen did his best to understand what he was seeing through the forest-fairy’s eyes, but could make little sense of it. Were they supposed to take something from the door at one end and then lower it down the shaft? Gold? Jewels? Or did the exchange more likely go the other way around, the dirt and rubble from the mine’s digging, source of all this dust, sent aboveground for disposal?

The brutish guards finished herding the rest of the prisoners into the room but did not stop to give directions, if they were even capable of such a thing. Instead, a few of the shaggy, club-wielding creatures stayed behind to guard the prisoners—it was hard to tell exactly how many, since the star-nosed yellow fairy was doing his best to avoid eye contact with any of them—while the rest trooped out of the chamber. Whatever their work might be, the prisoners did not immediately spring to it, and the remaining guards did not seem to expect them to do so. The yellow fairy and his companions waited in attitudes of dull patience, but they did not have to wait long.

Vansen felt rather than heard a ragged sound—a shout from below—and most of the prisoners hurried to the pulleys above the deep, square pit, while others went to bring the wagon nearer. The slaves hauling on the ropes grunted and moaned until they had hauled a huge wooden basket up from the unseen depths, then they swung the basket out on a hinged arm until it dangled over the bed of the huge wagon. When they tipped it down several dozen corpses fell out in a limply flopping heap.

Vansen almost lost his grip on Gyir, or the fairy nearly lost his hold on Vansen.

One of bodies slid off the top of the pile and tumbled onto the stone floor beside the cart wheel, limp as a grain sack. The yellow fairy bent with another prisoner to lift the body— in life it had been a goblin, Vansen guessed, although the small creature’s hairy pelt was so caked with dust it was hard to be certain. There were no obvious marks of violence, at least not anything fatal: long weals ran across the dead goblin’s back, crisscrossed through the fur like roads being swallowed by undergrowth, but the skin had scarred long ago: it had not been the whipping that had killed this creature.

The yellow forest-fairy went about its grisly chores as though sleepwalking, which was just as well, since Ferras Vansen found it hard to watch what the creature was doing. It wrestled another fallen body back onto the cart, a bumpyskinned corpse of the star-nosed thing’s own type, with blood on its face but no other sign of violence. Vansen caught only the briefest moment of hesitation as the creature saw one of its own kind, then it turned away without looking at the face, pulling an emptiness over its thoughts that Vansen could feel. Nevertheless, it did not