Shadowrise (14 page)

Still, the wonder of this daunting place made her miss her own home—humble Market Square (although she had seldom thought of it as humble before) and even Market Row, which seemed now to be a mere alleyway compared to most of the main roads of Tessis, let alone when placed beside the Lantern Broad, which was wide as a tilting yard, a street with great stone walkways in its middle so people could find a place to stand that was safe from the heavy wagons crowding the thoroughfare. In places people had even crammed small houses onto these raised walkways! Briony could scarcely believe her eyes—a road big enough to have houses in the middle of it!

But it wasn’t home, of course. And more important, they didn’t need her here, or even particularly want her.

On the far side of the bridge Ivgenia made the soldiers stop. She promised she and Briony wouldn’t go out of sight and left the maids to entertain them—a task the girls preferred anyway, since they seemed to regard these Kallikans, whatever they were, as something faintly unsavory. Then Ivgenia led Briony down into a neighborhood of houses and shops so small that at first Briony thought it was something constructed for a royal child—an entire doll’s street instead of just a single dollhouse. The tops of the doors scarcely came to her shoulders.

As Briony stood staring up and down the miniature road, wishing she could get on a stepstool to look into the windows on the upper floors, a woman less than half her size walked out of a house a few doors away to toss out a pan of slops, trailed by a pair of tiny children. The children saw Briony and Ivgenia instantly, and stared at them with unabashed interest, but it was only after the woman had finished shaking out the pan that she discovered she was being watched. Eyes wide, she stared back at the noblewomen for long moments, motionless as a startled mouse, then grabbed her children and scuttled back through her doorway and closed it behind her.

“If we’d been men, or had the soldiers with us, somebody would have rung the bell there.” Ivgenia pointed to a temple tower, half-sized like everything else. “Then likely nobody would have come out at all. The whole street’s full of folk just like her. Dozens and dozens.”

“Funderlings?”

“Kallikans, silly! You wanted to see them.”

“Back home we call them Funderlings. I didn’t know you had them here.” Briony shook her head: it all seemed quite dreamlike. “Isn’t that strange—even a different name! Ours live in a big city of their own under Southmarch Castle. They made the place out of solid rock, with a very famous roof that looks like leaves and birds and . . .”

“The king and all, they made ours build here, up where everyone could see them,” said Ivgenia. “They can be mischievous, you know. They steal.”

Briony hadn’t heard that said about the Funderlings back home—it was the Skimmers who were supposed to be unreliable, with their strange looks and strange language. “Do you have Skimmers too?” she asked.

But Ivgenia was already off, beckoning Briony to follow her down the narrow, winding street, deeper into the Kallikan neighborhood. Now the anxious guards came hurrying after them and Briony heard upstairs windows slamming shut, shutters rattling into place, as the little people made their secrets safe from the Big Folk.

By the time they got back to Broadhall they had missed supper in the great banquet hall. Ivgenia went in search of something to eat but Briony was tired. She was still hungry, though, so after a while she sent Talia, her youngest maid, down to the kitchens to ask for a bowl of soup and some bread while her other ladies helped unlace the tight jacket she had worn out to the market and remove her shoes and hose. The fire was roaring in the fireplace and she wanted nothing more than to sit in front of it and warm her chilled toes.

She had settled in, and might even have drowsed a bit, when a horrible clatter in the passageway outside made her jump. One of the maids ran to the door and peered out, then screamed.

Briony shoved past the terrified girl and discovered little Talia facedown in the hall in a puddle of spilled soup and broken crockery. When she turned the girl over her face was dark blue, her eyes staring as if in horror. Briony jumped up, fighting the urge to be sick. The little maid was obviously dead.

“Poison!” Briony’s legs were trembling so badly she had to lean against the wall. The maids and other ladies stood huddled, wide-eyed, in the doorway. “Poor thing, she must have drunk a little of the soup on the way back. She said she was hungry. Oh, merciful Zoria—that was meant for me.”

—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”

 

 

B
ARRICK HAD OFTEN CRITICIZED his sister Briony for her slovenly habits. She let dogs sleep in her bed even on warm nights, dropped her shoes wherever she took them off, and would cradle the muddiest, most disgusting creature in the world to her breast as long as it was a baby—whether puppy, foal, kitten, lamb, or chick. However, despite all the times Briony had driven her more fastidious brother into a rage, his strongest wish now was that he could speak to her again and apologize for saying that she was the most untidy thing that had ever lived . . . because now he knew better. No creature, not even some blind worm living in the very privies of Kernios, could be more disgusting than the raven Skurn, with his meals of frogspawn and festering mouse carcasses, his verminous, patchy feathers, and his constant smell of blood, rot, and ordure.

The big dark bird ate constantly, head bobbing up and down over some horror or other with the infuriating regularity of a waterwheel in a strong current. And Skurn ate anything and everything—bugs out of the air, droppings of other birds off the trees, slugs, and snails and anything else too slow to avoid his horny black beak. Nor was he a tidy eater: his breast was always covered with a drying crust of whatever he’d eaten last, often with some bits still faintly twitching. And his other habits were even more dreadful. Skurn was not careful about where he defecated at the best of times, but when he was startled he gave up all discretion: wayward droppings might splash on Barrick’s shoulder or even into his hair.

“But us doesn’t shit on you a-purpose,” Skurn pointed out after one such accident when he was startled by a falling branch. “And as must be said, so far us’s kept you clear of the silkins.”

That at least was true. Since Skurn had returned, he had helped Barrick through Silky Wood with little contact from the creatures after whom it was named. A pair of silent stalkers had followed them for a while a few sleeps back, but had come no closer than the lower branches. Perhaps, Barrick thought with a touch of pride, word had spread of how he had dealt with their kin. (More likely, though, he recognized, was that they were simply waiting until more of them had gathered.)

He hadn’t seen a sign of them at all yesterday or today, and had actually managed a few hours of sleep while the raven Skurn played sentry—or claimed he had, anyway: not only was Skurn self-serving, he was old. Once Barrick had actually seen him doze off midflight, lose control of his wings, and crack his head against a tree trunk, spinning to the ground like a clump of black leaves. As he hurried toward him, Barrick had been sure the raven had broken his neck.

Is it a heresy,
Barrick couldn’t help wondering,
to pray to gods whose existence you are confused about and whose kindness you certainly doubt, begging for the safety of a brute of a bird you do not even like?

 

“I don’t believe you know where you’re going at all,” he shouted at the bird. “We’re going in circles!”

“No circles,” protested Skurn. “All looks the same, this, ’cause un goes on and on.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Between the mist, the thick trees, and the eternal twilight, Barrick had never been able to get a real idea of where he was or what this part of the shadowlands looked like, but they had been trooping through endless, indistinguishable forest so long that he was becoming desperate to see something of where he was. Thus, despite Skurn’s strong disapproval, he began to climb uphill toward what he hoped would be a break in the trees and some kind of view.

“Stay away from high ground and low,” said Skurn, fluttering nervously as he struggled to avoid the branches bending close overhead. “That’s sense! Everybody knows of that.”

“I don’t.” Barrick didn’t want to talk: his arm was already aching and he wanted to save the breath he had for climbing.

Muttering darkly, the raven fluttered ahead up the slope but soon returned.

“Us thinks us knows this place, now. Tine Fay be here. They nest all hereabouts.”

“Tine Fay? Nest?” Barrick shook his head. “Are they worse than the silkins?”

The raven lowered his head into his feathered shoulders, a corvine shrug. “Don’t think so. In fact, they be somewhat slurpsome if un can separate ’em from they weapons . . .”

“So let me be, then.”

“Not worse than them silkies, p’raps,” the raven grumbled. “But us didn’t say
nice
, either.”

What might have been an hour later he was still toiling uphill, ignoring an arm that burned like fire as he dragged himself over fallen trees and through clinging undergrowth—worst of all the creeper whose vines were covered with tiny thorns and whose velvety black flowers bobbed at the ends of the largest stalks, big as cabbages. These creepers seemed to colonize entire hillsides and choke out everything else, even the smaller trees, growing so thick that he would have needed a scythe to cut through them, although even then it would have been hard, sweaty work. Wherever Barrick found the blackflower vines—and they were all over these hills—he could only turn and make his way around them. Still, one advantage of the eternal twilight was that just as full light never came, neither did full darkness. At least he did not have to fear night finding him exposed on the hillside.

But where did this twilight come from? Barrick understood that clouds and fog could cover the land and keep out the sun, but how could they hold light in the world after the sun had gone down for the day? While they were keeping the shadowlands in twilight did they soak up the sun’s rays like a dry rag in a puddle of water, so that light continued to leak into the sky long after the actual sun was gone?

What does it matter? It’s more fairy magic.
But it made him wonder about the gods, who from all he had heard seemed little different from men, at least in the ways they lived their lives. Perhaps Perin and Kernios and the others had not become the masters of mankind because they were gods—perhaps they were gods only because they had been powerful enough to make themselves masters of mankind . . .

Skurn dropped out of the sky and landed on his shoulder, making Barrick jump and curse out loud. “Quiet, now,” the bird hissed in his ear. “Somewhat be moving in the trees ahead.”

Heart beating fast, Barrick pulled his broken spear from his belt, then took a deep breath and stepped forward, pushing aside a branch to reveal a small clearing, a relatively bare patch on the hillside. There was indeed much movement in the trees and rustling among the branches, but the creatures swarming there were smaller than Barrick’s smallest finger.

“They’re . . . little people!” he said. “Like in the stories!”

An instant after he finished speaking a shrill horn call sounded from the greenery near him and a shower of sharp little objects came flitting down all around. Two or three stuck into the back of Barrick’s hand; he cried out in pain and tried to shake the tiny arrows out of his skin but another shower of miniature barbs followed, stinging his face and scalp like horseflies.

“Stop it!” he shouted and turned again, but every direction he chose seemed to be full of prickling darts. At last he put his arm across his face and ran forward until he reached the first branch he had seen. As the tiny men scattered Barrick had a brief glimpse of chitinous armor like beetles’ shells. He caught the branch before any but a few had escaped and shook it until little bodies were falling all around him. He caught as many as he could, perhaps half a dozen, and lifted the squirming but largely undamaged mass above his head as a shield. He heard shrill squeals in the trees above and the storm of miniature arrows suddenly stopped. “Yes, tell them to stop shooting at us, Skurn!” he shouted. “Tell them we mean no harm!”

“Us said to stay off high places,” Skurn reminded him sourly, but after a moment Barrick heard the bird say something in a loud rush of trills and clicks. After a pause, Skurn spoke again—Barrick guessed that the voice of whoever was speaking for the tiny people was too quiet for him to hear. The raven’s voice and the seeming silence alternated for long moments.