(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (3 page)

After Coldgray Moor, the north experienced a century of relative peace, although troops of mercenary soldiers known as the Gray Companies, who had risen during the dreadful times following the Great Death and the collapse of the Syannese Empire, remained a powerful danger. These lawless knights sold themselves to various despots to fight their neighbors, or chose an easier enemy, kidnapping nobles for ransom and robbing and murdering the peasantry.

Anglin’s descendants had divided the March Country up into four March Kingdoms—Northmarch, Southmarch, Eastmarch, and Westmarch, although Southmarch was the chief of them—and these, governed by Anglin’s family and its clan of noble relations, ruled the northern lands in general harmony. Then, in the Trigonate year 1103, an army of Twilight People swept down out of the north without warning. Anglin’s descendants fought bitterly, but they were pushed out of most of their lands and forced to fall back to their southernmost borders. Only the support of the small countries along that border (known as “the Nine”) allowed the March folk to hold off the Qar while waiting for help from the great kingdoms of the south—help which was painfully slow in coming. It is said that in the midst of this terrible struggle a sense of true northern solidarity—as well as a certain distrust of the southern kingdoms—was created for the first time.

Only a fierce winter that first year allowed the humans to hold the Qar in place in the March Country. In the spring, armies arrived at last from Syan and Jellon and the city-states of Krace. Although men far outnumbered the Twilight folk, the battle against the Qar raged off and on across the north for long years. When the March Kingdoms and their allies at last defeated the invaders in 1107 and tried to pursue the Qar back into their own lands to eliminate the threat once and for all, the retreating fairy folk created a barrier that, although it did not keep men out, confused and bewitched all who passed it. After several companies of armed men disappeared, with only a few maddened survivors returning, the mortal allies gave up and declared the misty boundary they named the Shadowline to be the new border of the lands of men.

Southmarch Castle was reconsecrated by the Trigonarch himself—the Qar had used it as their fortress during the war—but the Shadowline cut across the March Kingdoms, and all of Northmarch and much of Eastmarch and Westmarch were lost behind it. But although their northern fiefs and castles were gone, Anglin’s line survived in his great-grandnephew, Kellick Eddon, whose bravery in the fight against the fairy folk was already legendary. When the border nations known as the Nine banded together and gave their loyalty to the new king at Southmarch (in part for protection from the rapacious Gray Companies, who were growing strong again in the chaos following the war against the Twilight People), the March King once more became the greatest power in the north of Eion.

In this Year of the Trigon 1316, three hundred years after Coldgray Moor and two centuries since the loss of the northern marchlands and the establishment of the Shadowline, the north has changed little. The shadow-boundary has remained constant, and effectively marks the outer edge of the known world—even ships that wander off course in northern waters seldom return.

Syan has almost entirely lost its hold over its former empire, and is now merely the strongest of several large kingdoms in the heartland of Eion, but there are other threats. The might of the Autarch, the god-king of Xis on the southern continent, is growing. For the first time in almost a thousand years, Xandians are exerting power across the northern continent. Many of the countries on the southernmost coast of Eion have already begun to pay the Autarch tribute, or are ruled by his puppets.

The House of Eddon in all its honor still rules in Southmarch, and our March Kingdom is the only true power in the north—Brenland and Settland, as is commonly known, are small, rustic, inward-looking nations—but the March King’s descendants and their loyal servants have begun to wonder how much farther the Autarch’s arm might reach into Eion and what woe that might mean for us, as witness the unfortunate events that have befallen our beloved monarch, King Olin. We can only pray that he will be brought back safe to us.

This is my history, prepared at your request, my lord. I hope it pleases you.

(signed,) Finn Teodoros Scholar and Loyal Subject of His Majesty, Olin Eddon

Prelude

C
OME AWAY, dreamer, come away. Soon you will witness things that only sleepers and sorcerers can see. Climb onto the wind and let it bear you—yes, it is a swift and frightening steed, but there are leagues and leagues to journey and the night is short.

Flying higher than the birds, you pass swiftly over the dry lands of the southern continent of Xand, above the Autarch’s startlingly huge temple-palace stretching mile upon mile along the stone canals of his great city of Xis. You do not pause—it is not mortal kings you spy upon today, not even the most powerful of them all. Instead you fly across the ocean to the northern continent of Eion, over timeless Hierosol, once the center of the world but now the plaything of bandits and warlords, but you do not linger here either. You hurry on, winging over principalities that already owe their fealty to the Autarch’s conquering legions and others who as yet do not, but soon will.

Beyond the cloud-scraping mountains that fence the southern part of Eion from the rest, across the trackless forests north of the mountains, you reach the green country of the Free Kingdoms and stoop low over field and fell, speeding across the thriving heartlands of powerful Syan (which was once more powerful still), over broad farmlands and well-traveled roads, past ancient family seats of crumbling stone, and on to the marches that border the gray country beyond the Shadowline, the northernmost lands in which humans still live.

On the very doorstep of those lost and inhuman northern lands, in the country of Southmarch, a tall old castle stands gazing out over a wide bay, a fortress isolated and protected by water, dignified and secretive as a queen who has outlived her royal husband. She is crowned with magnificent towers, and the patchwork roofs of the lower buildings are her skirt. A slender causeway that joins the castle to the mainland stretches out like a bridal train spreading out to make the rest of her city, which lies in the folds of the hills and along the mainland edge of the bay. This ancient stronghold is a place of mortal men now, but it has an air of something else, of something that has come to know these mortals and even deigns to shelter them, but does not entirely love them. Still, there is more than a little beauty in this stark place that many call Shadowmarch, in its proud, wind-tattered flags and its streets splashed by downstabbing sunlight. But although this hilly fortress is the last bright and welcoming thing you will see before entering the land of silence and fog, and although what you are shortly to experience will have dire consequence here, your journey will not stop at Southmarch—not yet. Today you are called elsewhere.

You seek this castle’s mirror-twin, far in the haunted north, the great fortress of the immortal Qar.

And now, as suddenly as stepping across a threshold, you cross into their twilight lands. Although the afternoon sun still illumines Southmarch Castle, only a short ride back across the Shadowline, all that dwells on this side of that invisible wall is in perpetual quiet evening. The meadows are deep and dark, the grass shiny with dew. Couched on the wind, you observe that the roads below you gleam pale as eel’s flesh and seem to form subtle patterns, as though some god had written a secret journal upon the face of the misty earth. You fly on over high, storm-haloed mountains and across forests vast as nations. Bright eyes gleam from the dark places beneath the trees, and voices whisper in the empty dells.

And now at last you see your destination, standing high and pure and proud beside a wild, dark, inland sea. If there was something otherworldly about Southmarch Castle, there is very little that is worldly at all about this other: a million, million stones in a thousand shades of darkness have been piled high, onyx on jasper, obsidian on slate, and although there is a fine symmetry to these towers, it is a type of symmetry that would make ordinary mortals sick at the stomach.

You descend now, dismounting from the wind at last so that you may hurry through the mazy and often narrow halls, but keep to the widest and most brightly lit passages: it is not good to wander carelessly in Qul-na-Qar, this eldest of buildings (whose stones some say were quarried so many eons ago that the oceans of the young earth were still warm) and in any case, you have little time to spare.

The shadow-dwelling Qar have a saying which signifies, in rough translation: “Even the Book of Regret starts with a single word.” It means that even the most important matters have a unique and simple beginning, although sometimes it cannot be described until long afterward—a first stroke, a seed, a nearly silent intake of breath before a song is sung. That is why you are hurrying now: the sequence of events that in days ahead will shake not just Southmarch but the entire world to its roots is commencing here and now, and you shall be witness.

In the deeps of Qul-na-Qar there is a hall. In truth there are many halls in Qul-na-Qar, as many as there are twigs on an ancient, leafless tree—even on an entire bone-dead orchard of such trees—but even those who have only seen Qul-na-Qar during the unsettled sleep of a bad night would know what hall this is. It is your destination. Come along. The time is growing short.

The great hall is an hour’s walk from end to end, or at least it appears that way. It is lit by many torches, as well as by other less familiar lights that shimmer like fireflies beneath dark rafters carved in the likeness of holly bough and blackthorn branch. Mirrors line both long walls, each oval powdered so thick with dust that it seems odd the sparkling lights and the torches can be seen even in dull reflection, odder still that other, darker shapes can also be glimpsed moving in the murky glass. Those shapes are present even when the hall is empty.

The hall is not empty now, but full of figures both beautiful and terrible. Were you to speed back across the Shadowline in this very instant to one of the great markets of the southern harbor kingdoms, and there saw humanity in all its shapes and sizes and colors drawn together from all over the wide world, still you would marvel at their sameness after having seen the Qar, the Twilight People, gathered here in their high, dark hall. Some are as stunningly fair as young gods, tall and shapely as the most graceful kings and queens of men. Some are small as mice. Others are figures from mortal nightmares, claw-fingered, serpent-eyed, covered with feathers or scales or oily fur. They fill the hall from one end to the other, ranked according to intricate primordial hierarchies, a thousand different forms sharing only a keen dislike of humankind and, for this moment, a vast silence.