Shadowrise (15 page)

“Us thinks Tine Fay mought give us safe passage if you let loose those in your hand. Us told them you wouldn’t keep more than two or three to eat.”

“Three to eat? Three of what . . . ?” Barrick suddenly understood. “The gods curse you, you foul bird! We’re not going to
eat
them!”

“Not for you,” Skurn said, hurt. “Knowed you wouldn’t. More like they were for me . . .”

“Listen to your foulness! These are people . . . of a sort, anyway. More than can be said for you.” Barrick looked down. One of the tiny bark-clad men was struggling to cling to his sleeve, legs kicking above what must have been a terrifying fall. The little fellow’s bird-skull helmet had tumbled off and his eyes bulged with terror. “For the love of the Three Brothers, they’re even wearing armor!” While still keeping his head protected, Barrick moved his arm closer to his body so that the little fellow could gain the security of his tattered jacket.

“They armor shucks off easy enough,” said Skurn. “And them is proper toothsome underneath. ’Specially they young ones . . .”

“Oh, be quiet. You are disgusting, bird. Not to mention that while you’re talking like that up a tree, I’m the one who’s going to get an arrow in my eye if anything goes wrong. Tell them I’m going to put them all down, if that’s what they want, and not to let fly at me. Tell them that I’m going to let them
all
go, or by the gods, Skurn, I’m going to pull your tail feathers out.”

While the raven relayed these words to the Tine Fay, Barrick slowly lowered his hands from his head and down to the ground. The little people, who from terror or pragmatism had stropped struggling, carefully slid to safety. He hoped he had not killed any, not because it shamed him—they had been shooting arrows at him, after all—but because it would make things more difficult now. That was a lesson of his father’s:
“Don’t rub your enemy’s face in the dirt when you have him down,”
Olin had often said,
“not if you intend to let him up again afterward. Insults take longer to heal than wounds.”
It had never made much sense to him before, since Barrick felt he was usually the one whose face was being rubbed in the dirt, but now he was beginning to understand it. Going through life was perhaps a bit like going through this horrible forest: the fewer things behind you that hated you, the less strength you had to use watching your back and the better you could worry about what was coming.

When the prisoners were all safe the rest of the Tine Fay slowly made their way down from the trees and from underneath the bushes in the clearing—perhaps a hundred in all. It was not only their minute size that separated them from true men, Barrick decided: their features were longer and stranger, especially their pointed noses and chins, and their limbs seemed in some cases as thin as spiders’ legs. In most other respects, though, they were not much different than people many times their size. Their armor had been ingeniously constructed from bark, nutshells, and insect cases, and their spears were skewers of what looked like whittled bone. The looks on their faces were even those of a full-sized army in uneasy truce: as Barrick crawled toward them they all watched with fear and distrust, clearly ready to bolt back into the undergrowth if he showed any hint of treachery.

When Barrick was settled one of the Tine Fay stepped out from the crowd, his voice piping like a baby bird’s. Despite this fluting tone he had a very martial look about him, his shield made from a shimmering blue-green beetle’s shell, his little beard wound with ribbons, his head helmed in the skull of a toothy fish.

“He says that he respects the parley,” reported Skurn, “but if you come to plunder the sacred gold from the hives of his people he and his men must fight you to the death anyway. Such is their oath to their ancestors, to protect the hives and the honey-horses.”

“Hives?” Barrick shook his head. “Honey-horses? Is he talking about bees?” For a moment he could taste honey—nothing sweeter than sour berries had touched his tongue in months—and his mouth watered. “Tell him I mean them no harm,” he said. “I am trying to make my way to Qul-na-Qar .”

After a moment’s ticking discourse, Skurn turned back to Barrick. “He says that if you doesn’t mean to steal their treasure then they need to go back and keep an eye out for others who do.” Skurn picked with his beak at his chest feathers, worrying out a flea. “They never stay long in the open—already they feel fretsome about being so long out of the shadows.” Skurn cocked his head as the tiny chieftain spoke again. “But because you are honorable and they do not wish you to die horribly, they say go not near Cursed Hill.”

“Cursed Hill? What is that?”

“Us has heard of it,” the raven said gravely, “but heard nothing good. Us should be on our way.”

But the chief wasn’t done. He piped a few more times, pointing agitatedly at the bird.

“What’s he saying?”

“Naught.” Skurn was a study in disinterest. “Merest chitter-chat. Farewells and benedictions, like.”

The chief’s voice rose to a higher-pitched squeak. The Tine Fay seemed to have a very urgent way of saying farewell.

“Ah, well, tell them I say thank you, and . . .” Barrick’s eyes narrowed. “Skurn, what’s that under your claw?”

“What?” The bird looked into the air rather than down where Barrick was pointing. “Nothing. Nothing at all, Master.”

If he hadn’t already seen the minuscule man struggling weakly, the bird calling him “master” would have given it away. “It’s one of them, isn’t it? One of the wounded ones. Gods curse you, let that poor little fellow go or I truly will pluck out all your feathers—and have your beak off as well!”

The raven gave him a reproachful look as he lifted his scaly black foot. A half dozen Tine Fay hurried forward to carry their wounded comrade away. When they had him secure, the entire little tribe swiftly vanished back into the undergrowth.

“You are disgusting.”

“He were already bad hurt,” Skurn said sullenly. “Nothing much can they do for him—and see how plump he were!”

I withdraw my earlier prayers,
Barrick silently told the gods.
I had no right to ask your help for a winged wretch like that.

 

It was hard to make complete sense from the words of frightened imps as translated by a grumpy raven, but as best Barrick could discern he and Skurn were on a ridge that stretched a long way through the forest, but they needed to climb down it again to avoid the place called Cursed Hill. Why it bore such a name he couldn’t tell. Skurn was sulking, now; the most the bird would tell him was that “folk what stray there come back mad or changed.”

In any case, if he had understood the miniature folk correctly, once past the ill-omened spot they should only be a day or so away from safer lands beyond the silkins’ territory.

Barrick hadn’t relished the idea of being shot in the face by a hundred tiny arrows, but he was still sorry to see the Tine Fay go. As a child he had heard many stories of the little people, but had never thought to see them—it wasn’t as if they were running around in the halls of Southmarch. Yet here they were and he had met them. It was just one more way in which his life had turned out to be even stranger than he had ever suspected it would.

Of course,
he thought,
lately most of it has also been worse than I could have guessed.

They continued to the top of the ridge and eventually found a rock outcropping that jutted a few feet above the trees so Barrick could make out something of the surrounding country. As Barrick climbed wearily up the rock he reminded himself that this feeling of time slipping away, while perhaps true in some larger sense, was mostly an illusion: the sun would not go down soon, no matter how dark the sky looked. It was true he would have to stop for sleep before too long, but it would not be in the dark. He would rise after a few hours, but the sun would not. Things were not going to change here.

And perhaps now Southmarch and all the March Kingdoms are like this, too,
he thought.
Perhaps the Qar have dragged this blanket of shadow over all the lands of men. Perhaps this is all Briony and the others in Southmarch can see, too.
It was a dreary, disheartening thought.

He looked out over the rumpled, misty sea of treetops. The small folk had been right: he was on top of a long ridge that ran through the forest like a raised dike. On the horizon ahead of him, just at the point where the mists were thickest, a single large hill rose above both forest and ridge, a huge and solitary lump of green shrouded in plumes of fog; an outcrop of tall rocks ringed the hilltop like broken teeth. Perhaps because of the way it loomed above the sea of mist and yet had its own cloud of fog, the hill looked old and secretive, like a beggar so wrapped in rags he could not be distinguished from his background until he moved.

Barrick found he had no quibble with the Tine Fay’s advice: he did not want to go anywhere near the spot called Cursed Hill.

He was exhausted but awake, staring up at nothing and wishing he could fall asleep. The old raven was huddled in his feathers close to Barrick’s side, his snore a thin whistle. A flutter of rain was making the leaves bob above the prince’s head, and beyond stretched the flat, gray blanket of twilight.

How long since I’ve seen the sun?
he wondered.
Or the moon, for that matter? By the Three, how can these shadowland creatures live this way? They can’t even see the stars!

The stories said that the Twilight People had created the pall two centuries ago, pulled it over themselves like a blanket when their second attack on the world of men had failed—but why? Were they so frightened of the vengeance of humankind that they had chosen to give up the sun and the open sky forever—to put aside even night and day? He had seen the fairy folk on the battlefield; even with much smaller numbers than Barrick’s people they had destroyed the human army. They certainly weren’t cowards, either. Had their numbers been so much less or their warcraft so much more clumsy two hundred years ago . . . ?

Barrick was distracted from this thought by a movement in the branches high overhead. He lay still and kept his eyes narrowed as though they were closed. There! Something was creeping through the uppermost canopy like a huge, white spider—a silkin.

A second pale shape clambered silently out beside the first and together they crouched, staring down. It was all he could do to stay quiet. At last he pretended to yawn and stretch, as though he were just now waking up. The silkins went utterly still for a moment, then retreated back into the shadowy upper branches, but Barrick’s heart did not slow down for a long time.

So they were still out there. What were the nasty things waiting for? Surely they could have no other reason to follow him than to seek a chance to attack, but he had already slept several times and they had done nothing. What were they waiting for?

A fine drizzle pattered on the leaves above him and occasionally drifted down to tickle his face, but it didn’t matter: he wasn’t going to sleep any time soon, anyway.

Barrick and Skurn had followed the bony ridgeline as long as they could, but now the hills were sloping downward, each a little smaller than the one before. The Cursed Hill loomed just ahead, blocking the sky like the dome of some great temple, silent and mysterious. Barrick did not much want to descend into the dark valleys where the trees blocked out most of what little light there was, but if that was how best to avoid such an ill-favored place, he thought, then the valleys it would be.

Even Skurn seemed to have lost his courage. “Smells worse, that mountain, as us gets closer,” was the best he could explain. “Stinks of old days and dead gods—worse than Greatdeeps. Even the silkins don’t go there.”

Worse than Greatdeeps . . .
Barrick shuddered and looked away. The horror of the tunnels and one-eyed Jikuyin, the dreadful king of those depths, would never leave him as long as he breathed.