Tad Williams
October, 2016
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Part
One
The Ruined Fortress
At first, in the flurrying snow, he thought the soldier stumbling in front of him, through the icy mud of the Frostmarch Road, had been wounded, that the man’s neck and shoulders were spattered with blood. As he steered his horse around the hobbling figure he saw that the blobs of red had a regular shape and pattern, like waves. He reined up until the soldier was limping beside him.
“Where did you get that?” Porto asked. “That scarf?”
The soldier, thin and several years younger than Porto, only stared up at him and shook his head.
“I asked you a question. Where did you get it?”
“My mother wove it for me. Piss off.”
Porto settled back in his saddle, amused. “Are you really a Harborsider, or is your mother a bit blind?”
The younger soldier looked up at him with a blend of confusion and irritation: he thought he was being insulted but wasn’t sure. “What do you know about it?”
“More than you do, as it turns out, because I’m from the Rocks and we’ve been drubbing you lot at town-ball for centuries.”
“You’re a Shoro—a Geyser?”
“And you’re a Dogfish, dim as can be. What’s your name?”
The young foot soldier looked him over carefully. The two waterfront neighborhoods—setros, as they were called in Ansis Pelippé, the largest city on Perdruin—were ancient rivals, and even here, hundreds of leagues north of that island’s shores, it was obvious that his first impulse was to brace for a beating. “Tell me yours.”
The man on the horse laughed. “Porto of Shoro Bay. Owner of one horse and most of a suit of armor. And you?”
“Endri. Baker’s son.”
At last, and as if he had been holding it back, the youth smiled. He still had most of his teeth and it made him seem even younger, like one of the boys who had run beside Porto’s horse waving and shouting as he made his way through Nabban, all those months ago.
“By the love of Usires, you’re a tall one, aren’t you!” Endri looked him up and down. “What are you doing so far away from home, my lord?”
“No lord, me, just a man lucky enough to have a horse. And you’re freezing to death because you can’t walk fast enough. What happened to your foot?”
The younger soldier shrugged. “Horse stepped on it. Not your horse. I don’t think it was, anyway.”
“It wasn’t. I’d have remembered you, with your Harborside scarf.”
“I wish I had another. I’d even wear one in damned Shoro blue. It’s so bloody cold here I’m dying. Are we in Rimmersgard yet?”
“Crossed the border two days back. But they all live like mountain trolls up here. Houses built of snow and nothing to eat but pine needles. Climb up.”
“What?”
“Climb up. First time I ever helped a Dogfish, but you won’t even make it to the border fort like that. Here, take my hand and I’ll pull you up to the saddle.”
When Endri had settled behind him, Porto gave him a sip from his drinking horn. “It was terrible, by the way.”
“What was terrible?”
“The beating we gave you lot this year on St. Tunato’s Day. Your Dogfish were weeping in the streets like women.”
“Liar. Nobody wept.”
“Only because they were too busy begging for mercy.”
“You know what my father always says? ‘Go to the palace for justice, go to the church for mercy, but go to the Rocks for liars and thieves.’”
Porto laughed. “For a sniveling Harborsider, your father is a wise man.”
“This is a true story, if words can be true. If not, then these are only words.
“Once upon the past, during the preserve of the queen’s sixteenth High Celebrant, in the era of the Wars of Return, our people, the Cloud Children, were defeated by a coalition of mortals and the Zida’ya, our own treacherous kin, at the Battle for Asu’a. The Storm King Ineluki returned to death, his plans in ruins. Our great Queen Utuk’ku survived, but fell into the keta-yi’indra, a healing sleep nearly as profound as death. It seemed to some of our people that the end of all stories had arrived, that the Great Song itself was coming to an end so that the universe could take its next age-long breath.
“Many, many of our folk who had fought for their queen in a losing cause now departed from the southern lands with thought only of returning to their home in the north ahead of the vengeance of the mortals, who would not be content with their victory, but would strive to overthrow our mountain home and extinguish the last of the Cloud Children.
“This was the moment when the People were nearly destroyed. But it was also a moment of extraordinary grace, of courage beyond the proudest demands we make upon ourselves. And as things have always been in the song of the People, in this, too, even the moments of greatest beauty were perfumed with destruction and loss.
Thus it was for many warriors of the Order of Sacrifice when the Storm King fell, as well as those of other orders who had accompanied them to the enemy’s lands. The war was ended. Home was far. And the mortals were close behind, vermin from the filthiest streets of their cities, mercenaries and madmen who killed, not as we do, regretfully, but for the sheer, savage joy of killing.”
—Lady Miga seyt-Jinnata of the Order of Chroniclers
“I had hoped you might be exaggerating,” said Duke Isgrimnur. “But it is worse than I could have guessed.”
“An entire village,” said Sludig. “No sense to it.” He scowled and made the sign of the Holy Tree. Like the duke himself, the young warrior had seen terrible things during the war just ended, things neither of them would forget. Now another dozen bodies lay sprawled before the tithing-barn in a chaos of mud and bloody snow, mostly old men and a few woman, along with the hacked carcasses of several sheep. “Women and children,” lamented Sludig. “Even animals.”
At Isgrimnur’s feet the body of a child had been half-buried by snow, the blue-gray fingers still reaching for something, the arm stretched like a trampled flower. How terrible it must have been for these villagers to wake in the night and find themselves surrounded by the deathly white faces and soulless eyes of the Norns, creatures out of old and terrifying tales. Duke Isgrimnur could only shake his head, but his hands were trembling. It was one thing to see the mortal ruin of a battle, to see his men dead and dying, but at least his soldiers had swords and axes; at least they could fight back. This . . . this was something else. It made his gut ache.
He turned to look at Ayaminu. The Sitha-woman had been standing a little apart from the duke’s men, gazing at the muddle of footprints and hoofprints beginning now to disappear beneath a fresh sifting of white. The steep, golden planes of her face and her long, narrow eyes were alien and unreadable as she examined the ugly work of her people’s Norn kindred, different from her only in the color of their skin. “Well?” he demanded. “What do you see? I see only murder. Your fairy cousins are monsters.”