Shadowheart (58 page)

One of the Temple Dogs near her was in trouble. His foot had slipped from the stirrup; as he struggled to stay in the saddle, a pair of Xixians were trying to pull him down. Briony spurred forward. Growing up, she had tilted more than a few times at the quintain—it was one of the first times her father took her side in a dispute with Shaso over what she should be allowed to do—but the short spear that the Syannese armorer had given her was nothing like a tilting-lance. It was so light that she almost felt she should swing it like one of the bulrush swords of her childhood duels with Barrick; as she reached the struggle, she jabbed it hard at the nearest man and caught him just at the juncture of his armpit and chest. It sank in several inches, mostly because of the power of her horse, and the screaming man spun away from her Syannese ally. An instant later, the horse of another mounted Temple Dog trampled the wounded Xixian into silence.

The second southerner had been distracted by the screamer’s fate; when Briony reined her horse up and then spurred back toward him, his eyes widened. He let go of the Syannese knight’s arm and mail shirt, flung up his shield to take Briony’s spear, and narrowly missed stabbing her in turn as she went past him. The knight she had come to help found his stirrup and, once righted, was soon belaboring the man with heavy sword blows. Another Temple Dog rode up and hacked at the base of the Xixian’s neck before he even saw the new threat. The man fell heavily to the ground in a pool of blood and mud, his head only partially attached to his body.

It was fighting. Real fighting, bloody, dreadful fighting, the kind that Shaso had taught her about but she had never actually known. It was terrifying. It was astounding, too, but mostly it was terrifying. She had been a fool to join in, and now she could not escape it. This was not a song, not a poem; it was blood and shit and shrieking men and screaming horses.

Heart hammering, wild as a rabbit in a trap, Briony Eddon concentrated every bit of her thought and skill on staying alive.

 

A man was on top of her, his knee pressing her sword back toward her chest. She didn’t quite remember how it had happened—something striking her from behind, a stumble, a slip, then this fellow out of nowhere—but it didn’t matter: in another few moments he was going to get his dagger out of his belt and he was going to kill her, and she wasn’t strong enough to stop him. Nothing in her life so far—not her family, not her royal blood or her princely protector, not even the demigoddess—could save her. Briony struggled to push back on the sword, to keep the man’s hands busy, although it felt like her arms were breaking. The Xixian hung over her in bizarre intimacy, mumbling words she could not understand, sweat dripping from his face onto hers. His gritted teeth, the mustaches like two horsetails, the huge whites of his bulging eyes, made his face a Zosimia demon-mask.

Something swooped past her head, a flicker of shadow as though someone had waved a hand in front of the sun. The pressure on her chest suddenly changed as the man rocked back, clapping his hand to his face. A moment later, he let out a strange grunt and slid limply off her.

Briony rolled over, gasping as she fought to get her breath back, then remembered her vulnerability, unhorsed in the middle of a battle. As she struggled onto her hands and knees, she caught sight of the body of the Xixian who had been trying to kill her, his tongue half out of his mouth and already swollen. An entire garden of slender needles protruded from his eyes. Needles with feathers on them.

Not needles
, she realized in astonishment—
arrows. Very small arrows.

People were screaming on all sides now, many of them in terror. Another shadow flickered over, then another. Briony looked up into the deepening twilight, squinting at the small shapes that swept past. Birds. Hundreds of birds were flitting through the knots of fighting men, and every time one of the birds dived and pulled up, a Xixian fell back holding his face or throat. Many of the southerners were running away without concern for direction, hands over their heads as if angry bees were attacking them.

The little man’s folk,
she thought as she watched the madness.
Beetlewhattsit. He said they rode birds.

Many of the Xixians were already racing madly back toward the shelter of the camp. Those remaining on the beach were rapidly finding themselves outnumbered. For the first time, Briony felt she might live to see the sun rise the next day.

Another bird snapped by, brushing her face with its wing, so close that she heard the shrill battle cry of its rider:
“For the queens! For the queens!”
And still more followed that one, a storm of wings dropping down in dark clouds, gliding in and out among the desperately fleeing Xixians, making them stumble and fall.

Zoria’s mercy!
Briony climbed to her feet.
If I live through this, I’ll remember this moment all my life . . .

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

 

 

 

A
COUPLE OF DOZEN REFUGEES from the outer keep were living in the middle of the stairwell that led to the Anglin Parlor, its walls painted in frescoes of the Connordic Mountains and scenes of the first king’s life. The folk crowding the stair were just as uninterested in the pictures on the walls as they were in making room for Matt Tinwright to get past.

He was angry to have to step over people, but he kept his feelings hidden. Some of the men were looking at his fine clothes with interest, doubtless wondering what they might fetch at one of the impromptu markets held on the green in front of the royal residence. It was shocking, of course, to be weighed for robbery by squatters right inside the king’s house, but these were not ordinary times.

One of the women reached up as he tried to get past her and ran her fingers over his sleeve. “Ooh, a pretty one in pretty clothes, aren’t you?” Tinwright pulled his arm back quickly.

One of the men took notice of his worried haste. “Hoy, are you bothering my woman?” The man started to rise. Another squatter moved a little farther into Tinwright’s path on the steps above him. “Did you hear? I asked you . . .”

He made his voice as hard as he could. “If you touch me, you will weep for it. I am on Hendon Tolly’s business. Do you mean to trifle with the lord protector’s servant?”

The man on the step above him exchanged a look with the other man, then sidled back a step toward the wall.

“Even his lordship can’t have it his own way forever,” said the first man, but he too was already in retreat. Tinwright recognized the tone of the squatters’ murmuring. They were still afraid of Tolly, but his hold on them was slipping. Half the outer keep had been leveled by the autarch’s cannons, and the lord protector had shown little interest in fighting back.

Tinwright made his way up the stairs as quickly as he dared, going just slowly enough to show that he thought himself safe. In an hour like the one that had fallen on Southmarch, he reflected, people slowly began to change into something else—something simpler, something frightened and angry enough to kill.

Hendon Tolly was standing at the narrow windows of the chamber looking down on the small, unhappy city covering the spot that had once been the royal green and all the space inside the walls of the keep to the base of Wolfstooth Spire, and if the base of the great tower had not been full of armed soldiers, Tinwright felt certain they would be squatting there as well.

“Ah, here is my pet poet,” Tolly said without looking away from the window, as though he could see what was behind him as well as before. “It has been a dreary afternoon. The day after tomorrow is Midsummer, you know. Speak some poetry for me.”

“What . . . what do you mean, Lord?” Tinwright swatted away a fly. The room seemed to be unusually full of them, even for summer.

“By the bleeding, vengeful gods, fool, you are the rhymer, not me. If you don’t know what poetry is, then I fear for the art.”

“But I bring news, my lord . . .”

Tolly finally turned. He was pale as a drowned earthworm, eyes deep sunken and shadowed with blue, his fine, high brow covered with sweat. His clothes and hair were in such disarray that Tinwright could half believe the dandyish Tolly had just fought his way through the same crowd that had accosted him on the stairs. But it was Hendon Tolly’s eyes that were most disturbing. Something bright and shiny but unknowable burned there—a monstrous secret, perhaps, or a vast, subtle joke that Tolly alone of all living creatures could understand.

The lord protector bent a little, as if he was bowing. His sword was in his hand so quickly Tinwright did not see the movement until the point was quivering a handsbreadth from his chest. “I do not want news ... yet,” Tolly said carefully. “I want verse. So speak, poet, or I will hand you your heart.”

Tinwright recited, nearing the end of one of Hewney’s bits of doggerel,

“Enough.” Tolly made a quick gesture like a man shaking warmth back into cold fingers; when he had finished, his sword was in its scabbard again. “Now pour me a cup of wine—you may have one yourself if you feel a need. There is a middling Perikal on the table. You will know it because it is the only jug still upright. Then you may give me your report on the Godstone.”

Tinwright picked the wine out from among the empty casualties that littered the table. As he did so, he noticed for the first time an odd bundle of clothes in the corner of the room, a bundle from which a single bare man’s foot protruded. Tinwright felt his stomach rise into his throat, choked it down, then leaned on the table for a moment with eyes closed, regaining control.

“What’s taking you so long?” Tolly turned. “Ah, him. Yes, that pig of a butler will never again tell me that we have no red wine.” He laughed suddenly. “As the blood was running out of him onto the floor, I said, ‘What do you think? Does it need to air a bit?’ He didn’t laugh.”

Trying his hardest not to look at the silent thing in the corner, Tinwright delivered the wine and quickly downed his own.

Tolly took a long, savoring sip. “Now, speak.”

Matt Tinwright did his best to make his days and nights of reading into something easily understood, but it was not an easy chore. He explained to Tolly, who did not appear to be listening very closely, how the
Hypnologos
sect had believed that the gods were not awake, but only touched humans in dreams, and that the scene of the gods’ downfall had played out right here, in Southmarch Castle—or at least somewhere nearby.

“The stone was here. It was in the Erivor Chapel and had been made into a statue of Kernios.”

“That old cuckold,” said Tolly with an angry laugh. “You see, even here old Kernios tries to keep her prisoner. But he cannot. No, I don’t care for any magical stone. If the autarch can open the gate to the land of the gods without it, so can I! We have proved you can speak the words to open the mirror just as well as Okros! Better, in fact, since you still have your life and both arms!”

“My lord?” Tinwright suddenly wondered if Tolly had heard a word he was saying. “I don’t understand any of ...”

“Of course you don’t, so shut your mouth and listen. I spent months with Okros, learning the truth that hides behind other truths. The
Hypnologoi
have a sign they use to know each other—Okros was one himself! Their learning is secret and shared only among themselves ... and certain others, such as me, who sponsor their inquiries.

“It’s the
land of the gods
we’re talking about, poet—the very place you prating verse-spouters are always on about. The place where they sleep and dream. The autarch seeks to open it up and take the power for his own. But I know how to do it just as well as he—Okros was ready, it had been the study of his life, you see?—and I have all the things I will need to do it. The stone ... that is something else, something foolish, a mere precaution that Okros already told me was likely not needed. We have a mirror that will serve the task perfectly well, whether the southerner has one of his own or not. But what we need, ah, what we need now ... is the
blood
.”

Tinwright was caught by surprise. He took a step back, heart beating very fast. “But, Lord Tolly, I have worked so hard for you ...”

Tolly laughed even louder. “Do you think I mean you? Do you think any immortal is going to smell the mud that runs in your veins and come running, especially when she’s been asleep for a thousand years and more?” He threw back his head and laughed even louder, an edge of madness in it. “Ah, I have not felt so cheerful all day!
Your
blood! Fool of a poet!” He turned and slapped Matt Tinwright across the face so hard that Tinwright fell to his knees, stunned. “Do not ever presume,” the lord protector said, his voice suddenly a snarl, “that you are like me. The blood that runs in the Eddon family’s veins and also runs in mine is the holy ichor of Mount Xandos—the blood of the gods themselves! But to open the proper doorway, that blood must be spilled from a living heart, and I assure you it won’t be mine.” He laughed again, but this time it was a distracted growl. “No, we must find a proper sacrifice. Almost all the Eddons are gone from here ... but there is still one left who carries the sacred blood.”

Matt Tinwright was confused and frightened. He had not heard Tolly talk this way before, as if he believed the maddest of the old tales and meant to act on them. “Eddon blood ... ?” Who could Tolly mean—old Duchess Merolanna? But she was from somewhere else, wasn’t she? Not of the Eddon bloodline, whatever that truly meant—she had only married an Eddon, like Queen Anissa ...