Shadowheart

15. Heresies

The village looked as though it had been abandoned at least a year earlier, but as Theron the Pilgrimer soon learned, that was not entirely true.

It stood by itself in a bend of the river he had been following because the roads were faint and overgrown here, as though they hadn’t been used in a very long time. Perhaps a few dozen people had once lived in the small settlement but they were clearly long gone: brambles had grown up the sides of the houses, most of which were only collections of cut branches and mud daubing. The grasses had moved in across the paths and animal trails that had once led to the village’s main road, so that the ramshackle cottages seemed to have grown directly out of the ground without human intervention, like mushrooms.

The weather had been gray and oppressive all day, with spatters of rain, but it was the horizon that worried Theron. The wind was rising—already the trees were beginning to bend—and in the north clouds had piled up in purple-black mounds, ready to roll down across the hills and drench the valley through which they had been traveling since they crossed the Southmarch border two days earlier.

“Boy,” he said to Lorgan, “go and see if any of these huts would shelter us. It’s been raining, so if you find one with a dry floor that should do for us.”

The boy looked to his hooded master, but the man with the bandaged hands was sitting on a stump, taking the opportunity to rest. Theron thought it nearly a miracle that a fellow so weak and unwell could walk so far each day, but something was clearly driving the bandaged stranger to reach Southmarch—not that Theron thought for a moment they would get anywhere near that far. In fact, the increasing strangeness and emptiness of these lands had nearly convinced him that their journey would have to come to an end in one of the towns along the coast of Brenn’s Bay, which they should reach in another few days. If he truly wanted to enter a castle at war, Theron’s odd companion would have to manage that himself.

“Go on, then,” Theron said to the boy. “Find us a place to shelter.”

Lorgan still hesitated. “What are those lumpy things under the eaves?”

Theron squinted at the nearest of the deserted houses. “That? Wasps’ nests, perhaps, but I see no wasps, do you? In any case, if you don’t poke at them they’ll do you no harm—that is well known. Now go and turn up something dry enough to give us shelter.”

The child went forward on tiptoe, which irritated Theron. It was bad enough traveling through such empty, godsforsaken territories with the disturbing evidence of human desertion all around; the boy skulking as if some terrible beast or ogre might step out of the trees at any moment only made things worse. Now Theron was feeling unsettled, too. “For the love of the oracles, would you get on with it?”

Lorgan leaned into the nearest house without touching anything, as though the very wood might be poisonous. He straightened up quickly and shook his head, then went on to the next, stopping only to peer anxiously up at the odd, grayish shapes hanging like curds beneath the eaves on either side of the open doorway. Again the boy did his best to avoid any contact with the house itself, and again he quickly withdrew, shaking his head.

“Muddy,” Lorgan said quietly, but with an air of defiance, as though Theron seemed about to argue, which he wasn’t—the pilgrimer was only weary and hoping they could stop here for the day and build a proper fire to chase the damp cold out of his bones. All he had to do was deliver this hooded fool to someplace as near Southmarch as possible, then take his money and go home. Never again would he have to spend a night in the rainy woods. Never again would he have to hear the sound of a wolf howling and wonder whether he dared to sleep or not. He had an entire sack full of the madman’s money, enough to buy livestock and a fine manor house in south Summerfield along the Brennish border. In fact, with all that gold he could maybe purchase a magistracy—or even a minor title! Theron, Baron of the Stefanian Hills—that was worth a little discomfort, surely… !

His musings were interrupted by a sudden shriek from the boy, who danced back from the door of one of the houses waving his hands, and then to Theron’s utter astonishment began to rise into the air. The pilgrim-master had only an instant to stare, then he felt a sudden sting on his own cheek, another at the back of his head, a third on his arm.

Wasps ... ! was his confused thought—confused because he knew even as he reeled back, flailing his arms and trying to drive the invisible creatures away, that no wasps in the gods’ creation had the power to jerk a boy several handbreadths into the air. After that he scarcely had any time to think of anything.

Something wrapped around his arm as he tried to drive the stinging insects away. Could it be spiders that had attacked them? But the strands were tougher than any cobweb Theron had ever felt. As he snapped one, he felt another wrap around him, then another and another. Still, there was no sign of whatever had attacked him except more stings blossoming painfully on his legs and arms. Theron roared in pain, trying desperately to break free from whatever was binding him. He could hear the boy screeching only a short distance away, and it encouraged him to fight harder. He managed to break through several of the clinging strands long enough to stumble out into the middle of the clearing, away from any of the houses. His employer, the hooded pilgrim, was nowhere to be seen. Theron swiped at his own stinging, aching face and wasted a moment cursing the fellow’s cowardice. Something came off in his hand as he rubbed at himself. He looked down to see, not a dying insect, but a tiny arrow or an even tinier spear, its sharp tip still bloodied, lying broken in his palm.

Theron looked up in wonderment and saw the eaves beneath the nearest house boiling with tiny manlike creatures. The boy had managed to snap the cords that had caught him and had fallen to the ground, but from his shrieking and writhing he was still clearly badly beset. Theron could not even curse now—his superstitious terror was too great. He hesitated for a moment, knowing that this might be his only chance to run and make his own escape from the demonic little creatures that were even now swarming by the dozens down tiny ropes, climbing over the boy to wind him with heavier cords and bind him for good. Only the gods could guess what they would do with the poor child when they had him… !

Theron glimpsed the depths of his own cowardice but could not go there, could not leave the boy to such a fate. Shouting, he ran barehanded toward Lorgan and tried to pick him up. Tiny men stabbed at his hands as he rolled the boy over, flinging many of them off and crushing others. An attack of sudden pinpricks up and down his neck and the side of his face made Theron shriek in pain. As he slapped at the wounds, several of the invisible strands wrapped around him, binding his hand to the side of his head so that the sudden imbalance made him wobble and then fall across the boy. For a moment, as he lay helpless in the grass, he could see the tiny men come leaping through the undergrowth toward him, little horrors with grotesque faces like festival masks, squealing and buzzing in a tongue almost too high-pitched to hear. Then they were on him, dozens at first, then hundreds. He tried to swat them away as they swarmed over him, but he had only one hand free, and a moment later they had wrapped his other wrist with their bindings as well. Lorgan whimpered and squirmed helplessly beneath him.

Then something smashed into him, knocking him off the boy and sending him rolling through the undergrowth and up against the nearest cottage. At first Theron could see only the eaves above him and the monstrous little men swarming down from their strange nests. One of his hands was still tied to his face, and he had a sudden horror that the tiny creatures would fall into his mouth and choke him. He rolled over and climbed awkwardly to his knees just in time to see the nameless pilgrim swinging a tree branch almost as long as he himself was tall, smashing the hanging nests under the eaves so that the pulpy, barklike material dropped to the ground in great chunks, along with dozens of little, kicking bodies.

The hooded man now began to use the massive branch as a hammer, pounding at the tiny shapes as they darted through the grass, macerating the pieces of the creatures’ nests, crushing as many of the little men as he could reach. Theron could sense rather than hear the change of tone in the little men’s shrill voices, aggression and anger now taking a sharp upward turn into terror as the nameless pilgrim began to attack all the nests in earnest.

Theron finally tore his hand free of the binding strings—he could see them now, dangling from his fingers, miniature ropes not much thicker than spiderwebs—and got back onto his feet, grunting as he continued to be struck by the occasional invisible dart. He kept himself as low as he could and made his way to the boy Lorgan, then lifted him up and carried him away from the cursed village as quickly as he could go. He stepped on several of the tiny men as he went and did not regret it.

Theron grabbed as much of their baggage as he could hold, dragging it behind him as he stumbled back down the path and away from the houses. Only when he had put the bend in the river behind him and could no longer see any of the cottages did he finally set the boy down and let himself slump to the ground as well, gasping for breath.

By the time the hooded man returned, Theron had found a slightly more sheltered spot and had dug out his flints to start a fire. The nameless pilgrim did not speak, but only settled down beside the blaze so gingerly that Theron could never have guessed less than an hour earlier the man had been slaughtering the tiny little goblins by the dozens. The strange figure accepted a bit of dried meat, taking it in his bandaged hands, which were now stained with new blood. Theron did not think much of it was the man’s own.

Lorgan was feverish during the evening, and Theron feared some of the minuscule arrows might have been poisoned, but he himself felt nothing worse than the great lethargy that follows a fight for one’s safety. Lorgan moaned and thrashed a long time, but near middle-night seemed to pass through the worst, and from that point on slept quietly.

The boy appeared much better in the morning light, to Theron’s great relief. Lorgan’s face and hands and arms were covered with welts and pinpoint wounds, many with part or even all of the doll-sized arrows still in them, and Theron had to spend a good part of the early light cleaning the boy’s injuries as best he could before he saw to his own. It was clear to him that the time to turn back had come earlier than he had previously thought, but there was no way he was going to risk himself or the boy traveling any deeper into a land that was clearly overrun with madness and the worst sorts of black magic.

As Theron put the last bits of the evening’s camp back into his pack, the boy finished talking in whispers with the hooded man and turned toward Theron.

“He wants to know when we will reach Southmarch. He thinks we must be close.”

“We?” Theron snorted. “We? We are not going to reach Southmarch. We are turning back.”

The boy looked at him strangely, but turned obediently to hear what his master had to say. “He says it is not far—a few days’ walk at most, he feels sure. And the gods do not truly oppose our journey, or they would have sent worse than that.”

Now Theron laughed, astounded. “Ah! So if we continue we may be allowed to discover what the gods consider worse than being stabbed by a thousand needles and likely roasted and eaten by little goblins? A shame to miss it, but still, I think I will pass.”

After another near-silent colloquy the boy asked, “Will you leave us, then?”

“If you mean will I leave you, child, no. I am not the best man who ever lived, and often I have forgotten that it is love of the gods itself which has given me my livelihood, but no, I will not leave you to follow this madman into danger and death. Either he lets you go with me or he will have to fight me.” But he had seen the hooded man fight now, if only for a few moments, and it was daunting to think of going against him.

Now the boy stared at him for a long time before turning to hear the words of the hooded man. As the child listened, Theron dug into his jerkin and pulled out his purse. A strange feeling was on him, but he felt as though the time had come to do what was right and do nothing else. Strange things were afoot, both in the wide world and right here between himself and this mysterious man. By nearly taking his life the gods had reminded Theron that they were always present. He would not forget again.

“Here, boy,” he said. “Come and take the purse.”

“He says to you…” Lorgan began.

“I do not care. I’ve not done all that I promised—I haven’t taken him as far as Southmarch-town—so I do not deserve his money. It does not matter. He paid me more than generously with the first gold coin, back when he joined the pilgrimage. If he permits it, I will take one more for the trouble and expense of bringing him so far, and if he is mad enough to continue without us, I will swear to find a good home for you, boy, if I do not give you one myself. But we go no farther.”

Lorgan’s eyes were wide. The boy looked as though he might cry, but it was hard to tell with a face that had already been so dirt-streaked, and was now swollen and blood-smeared as well. He took the purse and conveyed it slowly, as in some ritual, to the hooded man, who accepted it with equal solemnity.

The three of them stood that way for a long succession of heartbeats. The silence was breached at last by the ratcheting call of a jay, which seemed to break the spell.

The nameless man rose, still looking down at the ground as he generally did. After a month of traveling together, Theron had still never properly seen his face, or any of his skin. He murmured something that Theron could not hear, but the boy did.

“He says it does not matter,” Lorgan repeated. “He does not need living companions any longer. He thanks you for your honesty. When you die and are judged, as he was, he thinks the judgment will be a merciful one.”

Then the man in the battered, dirty robe dropped the purse to the ground and turned away, walking north along the track, back toward the village where they had all nearly died, headed toward Southmarch where it must lie beyond the valley and the hills.

The boy was crying quietly. After the man had vanished into the trees, Theron shook his head and took a few steps forward. He hesitated, then picked up the purse and tucked its jingling weight into his jerkin again. It did not seem important now—nothing much seemed important just at this moment—but the day would come when he would be glad of it again. And at least he could be certain that the boy Lorgan no longer had to live as a beggar on the streets of Oscastle or anywhere else.

Still, it wasn’t until the jay squawked again and something answered it from the depths of the trees—some bird or other creature he didn’t recognize—that Theron the Pilgrimer shook off his strange lethargy and he and the boy turned south, back toward lands where things made sense.

“No, you fool, put your hand flat against the wood. Now spread your fingers.”

Tinwright did as he was told, but it was hard with his arm trembling so.

“Open your eyes, poet.” Hendon Tolly made it clear this was not a request. “It takes all the joy out of the thing if your eyes are squeezed shut and teary like a little boy waiting for the clyster pipe.” He drew the knife back by his ear.

Other than the lord protector’s guards, they were alone in the room known as the King’s Counting House, which had for years been the office of the royal exchequer. The walls, paneled in golden fir, were stained with food that the lord protector had thrown against them and pock-marked with ominous, dagger-blade holes.

“Now, watch,” Tolly said, and flicked the knife. Despite a slight flinch from Tinwright, it did not harm him, but buried itself nearly two inches deep between the tips of his right index and middle fingers.

Hendon Tolly drew another knife, seemingly out of thin air. “Stay… !”

This blade smacked into the wood only a few inches away from the first and stood quivering, almost touching the web of Matt Tinwright’s thumb.

Tolly smirked. “By the Knot of Kernios, look at you! Pale as death and shaking like a leaf! What does a poet need all his fingers for, anyway?”

Tinwright swallowed. Hendon Tolly expected to be answered. “For writing… ? Remember, you wanted me to write about… about your triumph, my lord.”

“Triumph, yes. Except that crocodile-swiving autarch is trying to steal it out from under me.” A third dagger suddenly flashed through the air so close to Matt Tinwright’s face that he could feel the breath of its passage. As it shuddered in the wall beside the poet’s head, Hendon Tolly stood up. “He believed I had this… what was it called? This ‘Godstone.’ So perhaps it truly is necessary to the whole enterprise.” He pointed at Tinwright. “You… you will find it for me.”

Matt Tinwright was completely muddled. His hand stung where he had brushed the skin of his thumb against the blade of the lord protector’s knife. “Me, Lord? I don’t understand.”

Tolly looked at the guards along the far wall, who were grimly doing their best to seem attentive to their duty while never looking directly at Hendon Tolly for fear he would notice them; bad things happened to people the lord protector noticed. “You will examine Okros’ books and scrolls and find out about this Godstone the autarch needs. You will get it for me.”

“But, my lord, I know nothing about such things… !”

“And I do?” Tolly glared at him. “Get on your knees, poet. I grow weary of you.”

“My lord... ?”

“Down!”

Matt Tinwright pushed his forehead against the cold stones of the King’s Counting Room. He heard the lord protector’s footsteps getting closer, then the sound of one of the knives being yanked out of the wooden paneling. A moment later something cold and sharp slowly traced the spot where his left ear connected to his head.

“It would be the easiest thing in the world to take your ear, poet,” said Tolly sweetly, almost as though he were soothing a small child. “Or both of them. What kind of poet would you be then? A deaf one?”

Matt Tinwright didn’t bother to point out that he might still be able to hear even with his ears cut off. In fact, he didn’t even breathe as the knife tickled his tender skin.

“I have other things I need to do, poet. You can read and you are not the dullest man in my kingdom. I’m sure you can make sense out of all those old, learned fools rabbiting on and on. Find out what the autarch meant. Then find out where the stone is.” For a moment the blade of the knife pierced the skin and Tinwright had to struggle not to cry out. “Or bad things will happen—and not just to you. Lest you think you can simply flee my employ and hide from me, you should know that I have a watch on your sister’s house. Your mother is living there, too, I believe. It would be sad for them both to be burned for witchcraft in Market Square.” Tolly suddenly laughed. “No, I suppose we will have to burn them somewhere in the inner keep, won’t we? Too many cannonballs landing on Market Square these days. Wouldn’t want the autarch doing our work for us…”

Matt Tinwright was struck dumb with horror, not so much at the idea of his mother and sister being burned as witches—although his sister, at least, had done nothing to deserve such a fate—as the thought that if Lord Tolly’s men entered the house, they would find Elan M’Cory there, and that would certainly be the end, both for her and Tinwright.

“Of course, Lord,” he managed to say at last. “I will do just as you ask. You needn’t worry about me or my family.”

“Good man.” The cold, sharp thing was no longer against his head. Hendon Tolly had turned and was walking back to his chair, allowing Tinwright to breathe freely again. “In a while I will show you to Okros’ chambers—I think his books are still there. But first, I have had a thought. Put your hand against the wall again.” He settled into the chair, pulled a kerchief from his pocket and draped it over his face. “I think I can do this without being able to see you, but you’d better talk, just to be on the safe side—that will help me aim. Recite something, poet.” He lifted the knife.

This time Matt Tinwight did close his eyes. If the lord protector couldn’t see, he didn’t want to either.

An hour later Tinwright was waiting outside Avin Brone’s cabinet, through some miracle still in possession of all his fingers. He could not help feeling impatient. He was off Tolly’s leash for the first time in over a tennight and he had many things to do, visiting Avin Brone only the first.

Tinwright had seen no one either following him or watching for him when he left Hendon Tolly, but just to be cautious, he had left and then come back into the residence through a minor gate, then promptly lost himself in the warren of tiny rooms that had been made in the past two centuries out of what had once been the broad heights and expanse of the old King’s Chapel on the ground floor. More recently, it had been a school for the sons (and a few daughters) of nobility. Now the siege had driven all the castle’s defenders back to the inner keep, and the boxy maze was serving as the lord constable’s chambers, crowded with pages and soldiers. Brone, in exile only a month or so before, had been given his own small suite of rooms.

The men in Eddon livery guarding Brone looked very serious—Tinwright could tell this was no sleepy backwater. However much Brone infuriated and terrified him, he had to admit that the man was formidable. Only a few months ago he had been all but imprisoned in his house at Landsend and roundly mocked at court. Now he was back in the thick of things again, his chambers right next to those of Berkan Hood—the man who had replaced him! Brone had outmaneuvered them all. With Olin gone and so many of the March Kingdoms’ best dying in battle during the last year, no one else commanded near the loyalty Brone still did—certainly not Hendon Tolly.

“By the three benevolent brothers, where have you been, little Tinwright?” said the big man when the poet was finally allowed in. “I’ve got Perch and Chaffy looking for you with the aim of breaking your legs.”

“Hendon Tolly has kept me at his side for the last tennight and more.”

Brone only snorted at this and didn’t even offer Tinwright a drink (he never did), but underneath the usual bluster, he seemed fairly pleased to see the young man alive and well.

“I’ll keep the guards out a bit longer, then, eh?” said the count. He took a comfortable listening position with his sore foot on a hassock. “Tell me everything you have seen and heard, poet. Give me something useful and there’s gold in it for you.”

Gold? I’ll be grateful just to get out of all this alive, Tinwright thought, but of course he didn’t say it—he could certainly find use for a few coins of any metal. He did his best to tell Brone everything that had happened, starting with the strange scene in the cemetery and Okros’ corpse in the Eddon family crypt, continuing through everything he could remember of his days of personal service to Hendon Tolly. He was only halfway through, and had just finished telling Brone in a slightly stumbling fashion about the lord protector’s meeting with the autarch, when the older man did something that astonished him. Brone lifted his hand to silence Tinwright in mid-sentence, then shouted for a page.

“Oyler, bring some food for Master Tinwright,” he told the dirty-faced boy when he came in. “And nothing cold and nasty, you little devil. Make sure you take something that’s been on the fire.”

The boy scuttled out. Then, as Tinwright was already wondering if he’d fallen asleep and was dreaming, Brone lifted a jug of wine out from behind his chair—not without a great deal of grunting and cursing—and poured a cup for himself and also one for Tinwright. Unprecedented!

“When you’ve had something to eat—you look terrible, lad, by the by—you’ll tell me all that autarch bit again, and slowly, so I can write it down. Go on, drink up.” Brone frowned at Tinwright for a moment, as if it was the poet who was playing out of character instead of Brone himself. “In the meantime, while you’re eating, tell me everything else that’s happened since then.” He shook his head. “So that was what truly happened to Okros, was it? His wound never looked much like he had been caught under a wall—the Three alone know how many walls we’ve seen knocked down since those cannons started booming, and how many dead and dying we’ve pulled out from under the stones. Not to mention that there was no arm to be found. No, I couldn’t make sense of it, myself—murder, certainly, but taking an arm off like that, neat as a butcher… ?”

Tinwright stayed with Brone for what must have been at least another hour and was likely more. Brone kept asking him questions, which sometimes made him change what he had said before, which Brone would then cross out from the parchment with a great many sulfurous curses before laboriously writing down the new version.

When the questioning was over, Lord Brone told Tinwright some ways he could get a letter to him in sudden need. Then, to make the topsy-turvy evening complete, he offered Tinwright a handclasp of farewell. “You’ve done well,” the large man said. “This is much and much to think about. Try to stay alive. It would mean a loss of useful information if Tolly put a knife in your throat.”

This last was much more like the Brone he knew, and in a way it made everything that had come before seem even more impressive. The man hadn’t gone mad: Tinwright must have actually pleased him.

After leaving Brone, he had an overwhelming urge to go and see Elan, but if Hendon knew about his sister’s house as he had claimed, then the worst thing Tinwright could do would be to draw further attention by actually going there. Since for once he wasn’t hungry, he decided to take advantage of this unusual feeling of well being and have a start at the work he was supposed to be doing.

Okros’ rooms were also in the residence, only a few corridors away from the old royal chambers that Hendon Tolly had commandeered for his own. The sour-faced guard waiting in front of Okros’ doorway wore the key on a chain around his neck, but when he saw the message bearing Hendon Tolly’s seal, he sprang to attention. After unlocking the door, he clearly intended to follow Matt Tinwright inside, but the poet told him, “I need to be on my own here. ‘It is not enough to see with the eyes of my body,’ ” he added, quoting from the Kracian bard Tyron. “ ‘I must see with my soul as well, or I am no better than blind.’ ”

The guard gave him a look that suggested speaking Kracian poetry was a suspicious thing to do even at the best of times, but reluctantly agreed to remain outside.

Tolly had told him that Dioketian Okros’ rooms had been left more or less as they had been when he died. If so, Tinwright decided, the physician must have been something less than tidy. The place was in chaos, books and papers piled on every surface, as well as what looked like entire baskets of documents dumped out and scattered across the floor. Tinwright suspected however that some of the havoc had been caused since the scholar’s death and that more than a few people had likely rummaged through this chamber in search of any secrets or wealth Okros might have harbored, perhaps even the guard standing outside this moment. Tinwright knew that Hendon Tolly had taken many of the physician’s books and artifacts himself on the night Okros died; he would not be able to examine those without Tolly watching over him. This was his one chance to see if Okros had left anything else.

What remained seemed to be divided between the most ordinary and the most esoteric sorts of texts, mostly to do with history and the divinatory arts. The only thing that caught his attention was a volume entitled The Agony of Truth Forsworn, which he had never seen nor heard of, but whose author, Rhantys of Kalebria, he seemed to remember having once heard something strange about. Tinwright pulled it from the shelf and then began to look in less obvious places, testing the dead scholar’s furniture for secret drawers, even examining the backs of all the cabinets for hidden compartments, but with no luck. While Tinwright was pushing the last of them back against the wall, he did notice something quite extraordinary. On the corner of the top of the cabinet, on a surface otherwise covered in a thick fall of dust, were several strange marks which looked almost exactly like the prints of tiny human feet.

It had to be some trick of the eye, he decided—probably they were only the marks of someone’s fingers who had, like Tinwright, been moving the cabinet. Still, it was impossible to look at the half dozen small marks, obscured though they were by subsequent larger and less specific marks, and not imagine a human the size of a clothes peg leaving them behind in the dust like tracks in the snow.

To his great irritation, Tinwright then had to spend long moments quibbling with the guard as to whether he was permitted to remove something from the room, but he relied on his temporary power as Lord Protector Hendon Tolly’s envoy and the guard, grumbling, finally gave up.

While he had this unwonted freedom, Matt Tinwright had no desire at all to go anywhere near Hendon Tolly himself, so instead he made his way back across the residence and out to the servants’ dormitory near the kitchens where he and Puzzle had for so long shared sleeping quarters.

The jester was half asleep on the cot, a little the worse for drink, but began to move over to make room for Tinwright.

“No, I’ll sit up,” he told the old man. “I have reading to do.”

“I haven’t seen you lately,” Puzzle said. “I worried about you.”

“I’ve been waiting on the lord protector.”

Puzzle sat up now, his eyes wide. “Truly? What good luck!”

Tinwright rolled his eyes, but it was foolish to expect the old man to understand the truth. “I suppose. I do not mean to disturb you, though. I just needed a place to read in quiet.”

The jester would not take the hint. “Did you know that Lady M’Ardall asked me to come to their house in Helmingsea and entertain her friends and family? As soon as the siege has ended, they will take me in their coach and all!”

“That’s wonderful.” Tinwright opened Rhantys’ book, trying to ignore the jester, who had apparently decided against sleeping and had begun to rattle off all the interesting things that had happened to him of late—interesting to Puzzle, in any case.

“… And of course Berkan Hood said he didn’t approve of talk about leaving, because, after all, we are at war. Have you seen the lord constable lately, Matty? He has been at it less than a year—how long was Brone the constable, a dozen years?—but he already looks like a man who can hear the Black Hound at night, quite pale and drawn and years older…”

“I’m sorry, Puzzle, but I truly need to read this.” Tinwright had been staring for some time and had not recognized a single word, although it was in reasonably modern Hierosoline. “You should get to sleep now, and we’ll catch up in the morning.”

“Oh! Oh, of... of course.” Puzzle gave him a look like a child slapped for some other child’s misdeed. “I’ll just keep silent. While you’re working.”

“It’s just that Lord Tolly will have my head if I don’t…”

“Of course.” Puzzle waved his gnarled fingers. “It’s of no account. I’ll just sleep.” But when he lay back, he was rigid as a plank.

Tinwright sighed. He knew when he had been defeated—his mother had been the supreme mistress of disappointment used as a weapon. “Oh, very well,” he said. “I’ll go find a butt-end of something to drink in the kitchen, and we’ll catch up.”

The old jester clapped his hands and bounced back upright, as pleased as if he’d found the Orphan’s coin and sweetmeats in his shoe.

Hours later, when Puzzle had at last fallen asleep and was happily, drunkenly snoring, Tinwright picked up The Agony of Truth Forsworn and began to look through it again. It was hard going—a series of cranky disquisitions on the great errors of history, as far as he could tell, many of which surrounded events of which he had never heard, like the apparently controversial Third Hierarchical Conclave. It was only as his cursory exploration reached the last part of the book that he discovered something which caught his attention, a heretical sect called the Hypnologues who had maintained that the gods did not merely communicate with mortal oracles during sleep, but were asleep themselves. This sect had been persecuted by the Trigonate Church all through the eighth and ninth centuries, and all but wiped out before the arrival of the year 1000, although some related groups had appeared during the madness of the Great Death when many folk in Eion lost faith in the Trigonate Church and other authorities completely.

But what was interesting was that Rhantys, writing in the early 1200s, seemed in no hurry to join in the condemnation of the Hypnologues. He even quoted from many of the Oniri and from passages in the Book of the Trigon itself in a way that suggested the heretics might be correct—that the gods might truly be asleep and taking a less active role in the lives of men than had been true in the days when the texts of the Book of the Trigon were first being assembled.

Some of this, Tinwright thought, sounded more than a bit like what Tolly said all the time. More importantly, it sounded like what the terrifying autarch had said as well. If two powerful men from different ends of the world both believed in sleeping gods who longed to wake and escape back into the world, maybe there was indeed something to it.

Then his flagging, weary attention was caught again, and this time what he read made his skin itch and his hackles rise.

“The Hypnologues had at the center of their beliefs a tenet that was stranger still—that the center of the religious world lay not in the southern lands or Great Hierosol itself, or even in Tessis, the more recent capital of the Trigonate faith, but rather in the northern territories sometimes called Anglin’s Land or the March Kingdoms, and specifically in the keep of Southmarch, the royal seat of those kingdoms. Their faith maintained that the entrances to the domains of the sleeping gods were to be found there, and that, in fact, the very struggle which had led to the gods’ insensibility took place there, back in the depths of time.

“Trigonarch Gerasimos, a man who had seen the Korykidons burned alive for pretending to have found the Orphan’s birthplace and making it a shrine, was not one to take a challenge to the church lightly, and he anathematized the Hypnologues in his Proclamation of 714 T.E. This did not end the heresy, of course—it would last until the plague era and beyond—but it marked the end of any public speculation about whether the gods were truly watching over mankind…”

So it wasn’t just Hendon Tolly and the autarch, Tinwright thought, it was an entire movement that the church had tried to destroy. And they didn’t just claim the gods were sleeping, but also that this very city—Southmarch, of all places!—had been the site of the kingdom of Heaven. Or something like that.

But how could something so mad be true, even if Hendon Tolly and some maniacal southern king agreed?

Then again, why had the Qar attacked Southmarch even before the autarch did? Why was everybody so determined to lay hold of this minor northern kingdom when all of Eion was in play? Clearly, whether he actually meant to help Hendon Tolly or not, there was much more that Matt Tinwright needed to learn.

He fell asleep that night with a hundred strange new ideas spinning in his head, and dreamed of himself tiptoeing through forests of twisted trees in near darkness, with giant slumbering shapes looming up on all sides and no one awake but himself in all the world.

16. A Cage for a King

“You cannot do it, Princess Briony.” Eneas could not stop pacing. Perhaps it was easier than looking at her. “I cannot let you throw your life away on such madness—it would be a crime against your people. I am sorry, but I must forbid you to go in search of King Olin.”

“And I am sorry too,” she told him, “but it’s you who don’t understand, Highness. You cannot forbid me. I am going to do it. I have not spoken to my father in a year. I will risk anything to see him.”

“No!” He turned to her, distraught. “I will not let you!”

“And how will you stop me, my dear friend?” She fought to keep her voice low and calm—she did not want him to think it was some womanly frailty on her part. “Will you imprison me? Will you force your men to listen to me screaming night and day that you have betrayed me?”

“What?” Eneas looked her up and down in something very close to astonishment. “You would not do such a thing.” He did not sound entirely certain.

“Oh, I most certainly would. I know it is dangerous, but I must go to him.”

The prince threw himself down on a stool opposite her. He looked so miserable that it was all she could do not to take his hand. Eneas was a good man, a very good man, but, like most men, he believed he was responsible for the well-being of every woman who drew breath in his vicinity. “You truly mean it, don’t you, Princess? You truly mean to do this.”

“I do.”

He sucked air through his teeth and sat thinking, toying with his ring. Helkis, his captain, stood near the wall of the tent trying to keep all expression from his unshaven face. “You say I must either imprison you or simply let you go,” Eneas said at last. “But there is another possibility.”

“Oh?” She tried to sound calm but she hadn’t foreseen any third way.

“I can help you not to get caught. I will send some of my best warriors with you…”

“No.” She shook her head firmly. “That will do no good. I’m not going to fight my way in, Eneas. There are thousands of Xixian soldiers there, but there are also hundreds of local people, Marchlanders, who go in and out of the camp peddling food and drink and trinkets to the autarch’s men. And there are other women visiting the camp. I think we all know what they are selling.”

Eneas was staring at her with eyes wide. “Are you saying you will masquerade as a… as a woman… one of those…”

“As a whore?” She laughed. “Blessed Zoria, Eneas, look at you! Did you think I didn’t know the word? I will not masquerade as anything in particular. I will dress in shabby clothes and let anyone who sees me draw his own conclusion.”

“But your safety… !” he said, appalled.

She extended her hand. Her Yisti knife was already there, as if by magic. “I can protect myself—Shaso dan-Heza taught me well. Besides, there is no other way. Do any of your men speak Xixian?”

He darted a helpless look at Lord Helkis. “No, I think not. A few words, perhaps…”

“Nor do I, so we are not going to fool them that way. It would be stretching the point to try to pass an entire troop of soldiers off as farmers come to sell their onions. No soldiers, Eneas. I will go myself. No one will suspect I am anything but a local girl.”

“As if that guaranteed your safety.” He gave her a hard look. “I think you have been traveling with the players too long, Princess. You have fallen in love with legends and pretense. Just remember, such things are meant to entertain, not to instruct. In our time, great Hiliometes would have eaten the famous bull, not carried him up the mountain.” He frowned. “Very well, then all I can offer you is a distraction. I will not risk my men’s lives in a full assault, but there is a deserted village on Millwheel Road just to the southeast of the autarch’s camp that his men use as a sentry garrison. If we attack it with substantial force and then withdraw I think we will draw attention and make it easier for you to slip into the camp.”

Briony realized how quickly Eneas had shifted his thinking, and she was again impressed. Was there a cleverer prince anywhere in Eion? “You would do that for me?”

“I would do much more, Princess,” he said seriously. “If only you would let me.”

As the afternoon wore on and Briony prepared, she began to wonder if Eneas had been right: was she really too much in love with old stories? Had she taken the example of Zoria or even her own great-great grandmother Lily Eddon too much to heart? Outside her tent she could hear the men readying themselves for the attack on the Millwheel Road garrison and knew that despite the prince’s best intentions some of them might not come back alive. It reminded her of a favorite saying of her father’s, “Until you’ve worn a crown, you have no idea how heavy it is.” The thought of Olin sent a pang through her, not just missing him, but thinking about the fierce impossibility of ever living up to his example. Did she really want to put men’s lives at risk to satisfy her own need to reach her father?

But what if I never have another chance to see him again? Worse, what if I could have saved him but failed to try? How could I live with that?

She owed it to her people as much as to herself, she decided. The best thing for Southmarch would be King Olin free again.

Still, it continued to trouble her as she used the little hand mirror Feival had once given her and leaned close to the candle. She carefully rubbed wet dirt onto her face, a thin wash to darken and roughen all her features, but she laid it more thickly around her eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks to make her face appear gaunter. She needed to look much older and much less healthy if she wanted to escape anything but cursory inspection. Even here in the camp of the Temple Dogs, where she was protected by the power of the prince himself, men stared at her when they did not think she was looking—even sometimes when they knew she was. A woman in an army camp always attracted attention, unless she was very unappetizing. Briony had been thinking all day about what she could do to make herself less interesting and she had a few ideas.

“By the Three, what is that on your face?” Eneas drew back. “Are you hurt?”

She laughed, although she was not feeling very cheerful: the sight of the prince in full battle array had reminded her that she was not going to be the only one taking risks. “It is a wound made from mud and a little berry juice. Never fear, it is not real blood.”

“I hope that is the only such thing I see today,” he said. “On you or any of these others.”

“We may bloody a few Xixies,” Lord Helkis suggested with a harsh laugh. “Or even a few fairies.”

Eneas shook his head. “No. I will not make that mistake twice, Miron. Until we know better what these… Qar are doing, we will treat them as we would treat Marchlanders and will not show harm to them unless we must.”

He was a good man. Why could she not feel more for him? “May the gods grant you and your men all come back safe, Prince Eneas,” she said.

“And what will help you to come back safely, Briony?”

“My disguise,” she said, pointing at her face, trying to speak lightly. “And my cunning.”

“I pray to the Three Brothers that it will be so.” He reached and took her hand before she could think about it, then brought it his lips. “Take care, Princess.”

The closer she got to the autarch’s camp the more terrified she became. It did not help that the scout who led her over the hills was a taciturn southern Syannese whose thick dialect she could barely understand.

What if I’m captured? I do not fear for myself so much—although she did, of course, how could she not? The autarch’s cruelty was legendary—but what about my people? Do I have the right to risk myself?

But of course she could not judge that, not from here. She assumed that they needed her or her father back—that the people would be miserable without an Eddon on the Southmarch throne, but perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps they were even happy with Hendon Tolly!

Still, they’re under attack, she reminded herself. They can’t be happy about that.

As they got closer to the top of the hills, the distant rumbles, which she had barely noticed, became louder; Briony suddenly realized that the noise was not thunder in the cloudy distance but the drumroll of the autarch’s cannons—cannons being fired at Briony’s home.

She and the Syannese scout were on a deer track at the crest of the hill when the treeline dropped away down the hillside and she could see the broad, gray-green sweep of Brenn’s Bay for the first time in months and the mainland city looking surprisingly ordinary with wisps of gray curling from its chimneys. In the distance, through the haze of smoke and low clouds, she could see Southmarch Castle itself.

The smoke was not from chimneys at all, she saw a moment later, but from the cannons the autarch’s army had set up atop the mainland seawall and in emplacements along the shore. The long guns boomed over and over, a succession of muffled crashes like irregular drumbeats. The beach where the causeway once joined the Mount to the mainland was a seething mass of tiny shapes, so many of the autarch’s soldiers moving there that it looked as if someone had kicked an anthill, but Briony saw little sign of the camp itself but for tents erected in the public squares, as well as in clusters across the open farmlands between the city and the hills. She suspected many more of the autarch’s soldiers were sheltering in the city itself, but even just the number of tents was astounding.

All of that? She felt her heart grow heavy and cold. Sweet Zoria, the southerner has brought an entire nation to our doorstep. The impossible magnitude of the forces arrayed against Southmarch made her feel sick. The little March Kingdoms could not defeat such a horde even if her father were still on the throne and they had not lost all those men at Kolkan’s Field… !

Struggling with despair, Briony sent the scout back to Eneas’ camp and began to make her way down the hillside.

The sun was gone and the air suddenly turning cold when she reached the outskirts of the camp in the fields. She watched for a moment from a hedgerow and saw that there were still people walking in and out along the makeshift roads the troops had built, but far more were coming out than going in. She did not have much time if she wanted to be unnoticed. Briony joined a small group of peddlers a hundred paces from the guard post, doing her best to walk like an older, frailer woman as Feival had taught her—back and neck bent, head well forward, steps small and careful. The camp was too big to be fenced but four or five sentry posts stood within Briony’s view, each staffed with bearded soldiers in pointed helmets, all of them armed with spears or curved swords. She did her best not to hurry as she trudged past the observing gazes of the nearest guards, leaning her weight on the stick she used as a cane, holding her breath in fear that she would be called back, but no one seemed to pay her any attention.

She waited until she was out of sight of the original sentries before speeding her pace a little. The tents spread out on all sides of her, and now she could smell food cooking, spicy scents like nothing she had experienced since she had been driven out of Effir dan-Mozan’s house. The soldiers, as far as she could tell without making her staring too obvious, seemed to be of many different types, most (but not all of them) much darker-skinned than she was. Many wore a sort of uniform of baggy breeches and leather harnesses, but she saw other kinds of costumes as well, long, loose white robes that reminded her of the Tuani folk, colorful arrangements of scarves and brass ornaments that looked like something a jester might wear, and even one tall, pale-skinned man wearing black with a snarling white dog as his insignia; except for his pointed Xandian battle-helmet and diamond-shaped shield, he could have been a Marchlander.

The pale soldier, who was talking to a group of smaller, darker Xixian soldiers, noticed Briony watching him and stared back at her. She quickly dropped her gaze and walked on, so flustered that she remembered to limp only after she had taken her first few steps, but when she stole an anxious glance back at him he was talking to the Xixians again.

“He’s a bad one,” a voice said just beside her, startling Briony so that she almost stumbled and fell. “A Perikali fighting for the autarch, can you imagine? And do you think he’d throw me a copper crab for pity? Not only didn’t he, he kicked me, too.” The voice came from a small, hunched shape warming its hands over a tiny oil lamp. Briony thought it best to ignore whoever it was and walk on, but the figure called after her, even louder. “Wait! You didn’t rub my head. You don’t even have to give me any money. We have to stick together, our kind! Wait!”

Every impulse told her to hurry on, but the big, pale-faced soldier was looking in her direction again, as were the Xixians beside him. Briony stopped, then bent with careful gravity, pretending to pick something up from the ground before turning back to the small shape.

“Why are you shouting at me?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“Because you didn’t rub my head, dearie duck. I can tell you’re not one of those Xixies, are you?”

Briony had no idea what that meant. She was trying to watch the soldiers without being obvious, but they were still glancing over from time to time, although laughing now. She hoped that was all they wanted out of her, a little amusement. She squatted down beside the small figure as though they knew each other and were passing the time. “Why?” she asked. “What would the Xixies want with you, anyway?”

For answer, the bundle rolled back the saggy hood that had obscured most of its head, revealing a little round face that looked like a child’s, but wasn’t. “They like to touch my head. They think dwarfs are good luck.”

Briony was surprised and spoke before she could think about it. “You’re a Funderling!”

The little woman looked surprised. “Well, if I didn’t know you weren’t a Xixy from the way you talk, I’d know it now,” she said. “Usually folk out in the country only know the old stories, but they don’t truly know any of us. Did you live in the city, my pigeon?”

“I… once, yes.” Briony risked a glance. The soldiers were still there. She considered just walking on. It was almost dark now, which meant that the hour for sunset prayer was almost here, the planned moment for Eneas’ attack on the garrison.

“He’s one of them White Hounds,” the woman told her. “That big fellow there in black. Captured and raised by the autarch as children, they are. He breeds them and trains them like hunting dogs. Said they’re the cruelest soldiers in his whole army.”

Briony wanted nothing to do with the White Hound or any other Xixian soldiers, and the longer she stayed here, the greater the chance that something would happen. “I have to go,” she said, bracing herself on her stick as she stood, doing her best to look like an old woman with aching legs.

“You’re not from around here,” the Funderling woman said, “—and now that I see you close, you’re no one’s gammer, either. I don’t know what your kinch is, mortlet, but it’s not worth it, you know. Cheap? These southerners can squeeze a silver swan until it quacks. I’ve been here three days, and all I’ve made is this.” She pulled over a cap with a half dozen coppers in it. “See? Tight as Perin’s bung, the lot of them.”

Briony laughed at the blasphemy despite herself. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“I’m called Little Molly.”

“That’s not a Funderling name.”

“No, it’s not.” She gave Briony another sharp, inquisitive look. “What’s yours?”

“Just by a rare chance, they call me Little Molly, too.”

Now it was the small woman who laughed. “Well, from now on they’ll have to call you Big Molly. But you’ll have to find another pitch, dear. This is my spot. See that? That’s the beer tent, over there, and they gamble there, too. They’ll come and throw in a copper and rub my head to keep the dice rolling.”

Briony had an idea. “Can you walk?”

“Good as you!” Little Molly was indignant. “Just not fast. Legs are too short, and… and I’m a bit lame.”

“Then come with me and I’ll give you…” she thought about what she had brought with her,”… say, five coppers. How’s that?”

Now the Funderling woman looked suspicious. “What do you want from me? And where did you get so much money?”

So much money! Briony almost wept. Little Molly, despite her cheeky attitude, was very thin and pale, as if she had not eaten well in some time. “Never you mind. Just come with me—I’m tired of those soldiers standing so close.”

The Funderling lifted herself to her feet and together they walked down the main track. The little woman went gingerly, as though she were showing Briony how it truly looked to have fragile, weak legs. “Broke them when I was little and they never healed right,” she explained. “That’s why everyone mistakes me for a dwarf.”

“What else can you tell me about the camp?” Briony asked. “Are all the men here or in the middle of Southmarch city? How long have they been firing on the castle?”

“A tennight, more or less,” Little Molly said. “But they were here for days before that.” She looked around, although at the moment they were in the open and more or less on their own. “They say that the autarch, he met with that Linden Tolly fellow in secret, face-to-face. Some sort of deal they were making, but it fell apart. Then the cannons started firing.” She shrugged. “Do you know what you want to know yet? I need to sit for a bit.”

“Sit, then.” Briony crouched down beside her. Across the bay, the last daylight had lit the top of Wolfstooth Spire as though it were a candle. “I have heard tales that the autarch is holding King Olin prisoner.”

“Oh, we’ve all heard that. Don’t know if it’s true. Why would he? What would the southerners want with our king?”

Yes, what indeed? Briony wondered. And we might also ask what game Hendon Tolly is playing—does he want to ransom my father for some reason of his own? “So you don’t know anything about where the king might be kept if they had him?”

Little Molly gave her a hard look. “You ask some strange questions for a beggar-girl. Where’s my coppers? I won’t say another word until you give them to me, not another word… !”

Briony produced a silver coin from the purse hidden under her ragged clothes. “Here. That’s worth a dozen crabs at least. Now answer the question, please. Where might King Olin be?” Even as she spoke, she heard a strange, blatting horn call rise above the camp, a signal for evening prayer or else an alarm call—perhaps even the alarm about Eneas’ attack. Time was slipping away. “Tell me!”

Little Molly looked around in worried surprise; Briony could hear some of the men shouting to each other. Many others were hurrying in all directions across the camp, perhaps to get weapons or armor they had left in their tents. Eneas had made good his word. Now it was up to her.

“How would I know such a thing?” the little woman moaned. “Who are you? Why do you want to know such things?”

“You would not believe me if I told you, Molly, but I have given you what I promised—now earn it. Where would they keep an important prisoner?”

“But I don’t know! The mayor’s house in town, maybe. They used to keep prisoners there, I’ve heard, although maybe that’s when the goblins were here. Oh, and the Xixies have built a great pen on the city green for something—animals, everyone thinks. I heard some of the traders talking about it who brought in the metal—twenty wagonloads of iron bars just to make it! Can you imagine?”

Briony rose to her feet. “Keep the silver, Little Molly. May Zoria bless you.”

She left the Funderling woman looking after her in astonishment.

The fast-darkening evening was alive now with figures rushing past, with torches waving nearby and in the distance, and men’s loud, excited voices. She prayed that Eneas and his men would do as they said, striking only long enough to force the garrison to call for reinforcements before they fled back over the hills. The autarch’s troops would never follow them in the dark, and with luck would not send more than a token force to search for them the next day, assuming them to be local bandits or a surprise counterstrike by Hendon Tolly.

What was the purpose of Tolly’s parley with the autarch, if that had been more than just gossip—simply the southern monarch demanding the city’s surrender? But Hendon would never attend such a humiliation in person. Had he been trying to ransom Olin for some purpose of his own? A chill ran through her. What if the autarch no longer held her father? What if he was in Hendon Tolly’s hands now?

Briony had followed the track now all the way to Market Road, where the farmhouses and open land gave way to the true city. Buildings were packed in side by side here and the streets were narrow, which made avoiding soldiers more difficult, but evening had fallen and the encampment’s torches were too infrequently spaced to shed much light, which made her disguise better.

Even here, where the soldiers did not seem to be responding directly to the alarm horn, Briony could hear urgency in the voices of the passing men. Some leaned out of upper windows and called to Briony in Xixian; a few even came down to the doors and beckoned her in, but she only waved her hand in thanks and limped along as fast as she dared. Long-legged Dowan Birch had taught her how to keep her sinews loose even as she held a demanding pose which would otherwise quickly exhaust her, so she could continue this awkward, halting gait for a while more, but the constant ache of it was beginning to weary her badly.

She hurried over Grasshill Bridge and past the burned husk of a temple. When she was almost to the green Briony stepped off the main road, doing her best to make sure she wasn’t followed. Even in ordinary times the streets around Shoremarket after dark were a haunt of thieves and worse. She made her way a little distance south of the square, then onto the green, walking slowly toward the torches. Their light made the wide thing seem to glow, a sickly pale light like a mushroom crouching at night in the undergrowth.

The tent was a hundred paces across but only a dozen high at the center, guyed by dozens of ropes, a vast, peaked expanse of white that took up much of the center of the green where the city’s sheep had always been grazed. Torches blazed all around it, and several solders guarded not only its front entrance but the sides and doubtless the back as well. Briony was a little relieved to see there wasn’t much light beyond the ring of torches. As long as she kept a good distance away, she wouldn’t be seen while she tried to decide what to do.

She moved as quickly as she could along the edge of the green, staying in the shadows of trees or in the doorways of empty houses, of which there were more than a few. As she had feared, there were guard posts on each side, but the distance between them was large and the corners of the tent kept them from seeing each other. Shaso would have scoffed at whoever set out the sentries, she decided. The fool had made sure a spy would only have to avoid the eyes of one sentry post when approaching the building, which made the guards vulnerable to misdirection, among other things.

Briony did not need misdirection, though, because even as she watched from behind a well at one end of the green, a group of armored horsemen rode past with a great drumroll of hooves and clanging of weapons on shields, headed no doubt toward Millwheel Road and the besieged garrison—reinforcements. The jaws of the trap would close on Eneas soon if he didn’t put space between his company and this pack of hounds.

Merciful Zoria, help them find their way out in time! Eneas was a good man—a wonderful, brave man. She cared for him, she had to admit, more than she sometimes realized. A thought struck her. And help me, too, sweet goddess, please! She had almost forgotten to pray for herself. She wondered if Zoria could be bribed and decided it couldn’t hurt to try. If the Eddons regain the throne, I will build you a beautiful temple, Mistress!

As the reinforcing Xixians thundered by the men at the tent’s nearest guard post stepped out to watch them. Realizing that she would never have a better moment, Briony ran down the length of the green, waiting until the reinforcing troops had almost passed the tent. Then, with the guards now facing almost completely away from the nearest corner of the great tent, she broke from the trees along the edge and sprinted across the green, head held so low she had to fight against stumbling all the way. But perhaps Zoria had decided to accept her offered bargain. No one raised an alarm, and a few long moments later Briony was crouched near the corner of the tent where the light from the torches was dim, breathing far harder than she should have been just from running. She was terrified, but did not have enough time to consider that fact: she scrabbled at the bottom of the tent and found, as she had hoped, that there were bars beneath. She slid herself under the heavy fabric of the tent until she was squeezed between the canvas and the cold iron bars like a bed warmer slid between coverlet and mattress. There were some small lights at the far end of the tent, but it was otherwise dark beyond the bars, and the air stank of unwashed bodies so badly that Briony, who had been living among soldiers, still nearly squeezed herself back out of the tent again, despite the risk of being spotted.

As her breathing and the tripping of her heart slowed, Briony heard a sound very close by, a woman or a child quietly weeping. A moment later her breath caught at what sounded like murmured words in her own tongue. What prisoners were these? Was it some kind of brothel of captured Marchlander women? For a moment she entertained a feverish fantasy of waiting for the autarch here and stabbing him when he came to ravish another victim, but she knew even as the anger burned through her that it was a foolish and useless idea—the kind of scene that Nevin Hewney would have written after drinking too much.

“Who’s that crying?” she asked quietly. “Can you understand me?”

The weeping abruptly stopped.

“Where are you from?” she asked. She had given herself away now; she couldn’t turn back. If only it wasn’t so wretchedly dark! She had no idea how this prison tent might be set out—was it one big cage? Or were many separate cells grouped here under the ghostly tent? “Won’t anyone answer me?”

“Frightened,” a small voice told her from somewhere nearby. “Want to go home.”

“What’s your name?” she asked. “Why are you here?”

“Men took us. We’n been doin’ nought wrong. Came into village and took us, uns did.”

“Where did they take you from?”

“Mam?” said another voice, slightly older. “Did you come for us? Will you take us out from here?”

Zoria’s heart! Why had the autarch stolen Brennish children? “And you’re all prisoners?” Her heart seemed clenched like a fist. “Are there any grown-ups in here? An older man?” Would they know who her father was? “A king?”

“No king,” the small voice said, sniffling again. “Just us littl’uns.”

Before she could ask more questions, a sudden light flared on the other side of the pitch-black tent: someone had pulled back the flap and now stood in the opening with a torch. Briony crouched. More torches, more silhouetted figures—then the light dazzled her, and she had to look away. Briony stayed very still until she heard voices and the clang of an iron door opening and closing on the other side of the huge structure. The torches withdrew and the flap dropped, leaving the interior of the great tent pitch black again. Could the guards be looking for her?

“Can anyone else tell me if they know anything about why you’re prisoners, or whether the king of the Marchlands is one of the prisoners?”

When there was no reply Briony began to make her slow way around the exterior of the cage, still beneath the tent. She had to cross one doorway, but to her relief the flap was down and, judging by the voices of the guards, none of them were even looking back at the tent they were guarding. At last she reached the place where she judged the torches had been, the main entrance, but stopped short of the doorway.

She took a breath, but there was no sense hesitating, nor did she have the time—the guards might be coming back any moment. “Hello? Who’s here? Can anyone hear me?”

The voice, when it came, made her skin prickle all over. “What… ? Meriel? ”

“Praise Zoria! Father, is that you?” She pushed herself as close to the bars as she could. It was all she could do not to shout. “Father? It’s me! Oh, the gods are kind! Father!”

Suddenly, she could feel his presence. His hand came through the bars and found her face, which was already wet with tears. “By all the gods… ! Briony? Is that truly you?” Olin’s voice was hoarse, but it was undeniably his voice. “This is a miracle beyond belief! I was almost asleep… I thought… your voice; I thought it was your mother. Am I truly awake?”

“Yes, Father, yes! It’s me!” She clutched at him—he was so thin! Still, it was really her father, after all that time, clearly and plainly him. “I never thought I’d see you again!” She laughed through her tears. “I mean… I still can’t see you… !”

He was also laughing. “Are you well? What are you doing here? Gods, child, this makes no sense at all! Are you here by yourself?”

“I heard the autarch was holding you. I came to…” She couldn’t bear to waste time talking about it. “It’s a long story. But we have to get you out of here!”

“No, it is you who must get away from here, my lamb. They will be back soon to return me to my usual prison. They only put me here because someone attacked an outpost, and Vash feared it might be an attempt to rescue me. The autarch is out of the camp this evening and his minister is terrified something might go wrong while he’s away.”

“All the more reason to get you out now,” she said.

“It’s not possible, Briony. This is not simply a barred enclosure—it’s a cage, with bars on top and bars on the bottom that are sunk in the earth.” He kept his voice low, but she could hear stirring among some of the other captives. “I do not know exactly what the autarch plans, but he is obsessed with Southmarch and thinks somehow if he can take the castle he can awaken a god. Are you with Shaso or Brone? Can you tell them that?”

Briony laughed, but it was painful. “Shaso is dead,” she said. “I’m sorry, Father, but he was burned in a fire in Marrinswalk. Brone is either a prisoner in the castle or a traitor—maybe both. Hendon Tolly is holding the place, but I hear he has been bargaining with the autarch about something.”

“Then how did you get here? Are you with Barrick?”

“Never mind. We have to get you free.” But suddenly Barrick’s name was working in her like a spark slowly growing into a flame.

“You can’t! It’s too late for me, my dear one. But you must not be caught. Get away! Get away before the guards come back.”

“No.” And now it was burning inside her, a fire she had kept banked for months. “Why did you lie to me? Why did you do that, Father?”

He sounded surprised but not shocked. “What do you mean?”

“You never told me about… your curse. About Barrick. About what happened that night his arm was broken.” She bit her lip, fighting the tears again. “Why did you lie to me?”

Long moments passed. Her father had been holding her arms, but now he let go and even took a half step back from the bars. “I’m… sorry.”

“But why? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I was ashamed, girl! Can’t you understand? Ashamed that I passed my tainted blood to those I loved most in the world. Ashamed that I almost killed my own son!” His whisper was hoarse. “And now it is beginning again.”

“What is beginning?”

“The poison! The poison in my veins—I can feel it again. Oh, merciful gods, Briony, I might have been a prisoner for much of the last year but I at least I was free of my cursed blood! Can you understand? For the first time the madness that used to afflict me nearly every moon did not touch me. But as we drew closer and closer to the castle—to my own home!—the affliction returned. Even now I can feel the gall boiling in my veins…”

“But I would have helped you! You should have told me! We could have found a way to cure it—Chaven would have found something… !”

“You cannot cure someone of their own blood,” the king told her in a bitter murmur. “Not unless you slit their throat and hang them up like a slaughtered pig.”

Briony began crying again. “Then it’s my curse, too, Father. You had no right to keep it from us.”

“Don’t you see?” He came back to the bars then, caught her shoulders, and pulled her against the cold metal so that he could put his cheek against hers. “I would have done anything I could to keep it from you. You and Kendrick showed no signs of it.”

“But what is it? Why us? Why the Eddons?”

“Because of love,” he said. “Because of treachery and death, too. But mostly because of love.” And then he told her a tale so astounding that for a few moments Briony forgot everything else and thought of nothing but her father’s pained voice.

“We have… fairy blood?” she asked when he had fallen silent at last. “The Eddons… ?”

“The Qar claim it is the blood of a god,” Olin said. “That is what the autarch believes as well. That is why he keeps me, he says…”

“To do what?”

Her father tried to explain, but at last shook his head—she could feel it moving violently against her hand. “I do not understand it all for certain, but remember—we have only until the midnight at the end of Midsummer’s Day to prevent him—he has told me that hour is when this will all take place. It’s only a scant few days away now.” He hesitated; she could feel him deciding not to frighten her more than he had to. Had he always been so transparent to her? Or was it Briony herself who had changed? “Quickly,” he said, “while we still have time, tell me all your news about…” But he never finished the sentence. Voices were approaching the tent from somewhere behind her. Olin quickly stepped away.

“Hide,” he muttered. “Quickly!”

She had barely an instant to back away from the spot and hide before the tent flap flew back and a guard stood in the opening with a torch. As Olin turned toward the light, she saw her father for the first time and her heart flooded over with love for him. He was so thin! A group of children were ranged behind him, almost a dozen in all, sitting or lying down on the straw piled at the bottom of the cage.

Briony watched a tall, thin old man in a minutely decorated robe step in beside the guard. He gestured and another guard began unlocking the bars. “Tell your young friends that if any of them come too close to the bars, they will be killed,” the old man said. “I want no trouble, King Olin. It is time for you to go back. Whoever those bandits were, they have fled. The White Hounds are after them and will make short work of them.”

“I prefer not to go back now,” said her father, his voice pitched a little louder than it needed to be. “I like it here with the other prisoners. They are but children, you know—no one has showed them any kindness at all. I thought better of you, Vash.”

“I do the autarch’s work, King Olin. And I credit you for your sympathetic heart. but that is all the more reason you must go back—I do not want you fomenting revolts among the children.” He said something in Xixian to the guards. The lock clanked and the door creaked, and Olin let himself be led out by a guard at each arm.

“Very well,” her father called back over his shoulder, as if to the other prisoners. “Just remember, I love you all. Have courage—there’s hope as long as you remember who you are!”

Briony was weeping as the flap fell back. The guards were long gone before she dared to move or speak again. A few quiet conversations proved that the child-captives could tell her nothing interesting. She felt terrible leaving them to their unknown fate, but there was nothing else she could do. At the next distraction she slipped out of the tent.

I love you, too, Father. Briony hurried across the darkened green. With luck, she would be back in Eneas’ camp by midnight and they could think of a way to save King Olin. If love has cursed our family, perhaps it can save us as well.

17. Defending the Mystery

“They are too many!” the young Funderling shrieked as he rushed past. His face was dirty and flecked with blood, and he had dropped his weapon and shield somewhere. “The autarch’s army has overrun Moonless Reach… ! Run!”

Ferras Vansen turned to grab him, but Malachite Copper was equally determined not to let the soldier’s panic affect anyone else. He caught the fellow’s arm first and hit him hard with a flat hand on the side of the face. The Funderling soldier stared at Copper in surprise, took a wobbly step, then crumpled and fell to his knees.

“Now get up, man, and show that there’s some mortar where your stones don’t fit true. What’s going on?”

“Forgive me, Master Copper… !” The young fellow was terrified—it was clear that all he wanted to do was to keep running.

“Give us your news,” Copper said, “like the sworn apprentice to the Stonecutter’s Guild that you are.”

The soldier’s lip trembled, but he did his best to harden his expression; it was a less than perfect show. “They’ve broken down the last barrier, and they’re driving Jasper and the rest back like sand fleas, Master Copper. It was terrible.” He turned to Ferras Vansen and the others as if they had disagreed. “Terrible! Flames and something like burning oil all over—people screaming… and the smell, Masters, the smell… !”

“What could that be, Physician?” Vansen asked. “Chaven, did you hear?”

“Ah, ah, what are we discussing? Yes, the flames, that would be some blend of naptha and resin.” The physician appeared slightly befuddled, as though he had only been half-listening. “War Fire, as they used to call it in Hierosol.” He turned to Vansen. “There is nothing you can do against it except try to douse the flames, but they burn cruelly hot.”

“I do not believe that,” Vansen said. “There is a defense against any weapon—Murroy used to tell me that.”

“Who?” The physician looked surprised.

“Never mind.” He turned to the frightened soldier, who had calmed a little. “Do you bring any message from Sledge Jasper? Does he live?”

“I… I do not know, C-Captain.” The Funderling looked frightened of Vansen now, finally realizing how badly he had acted. “When the guardhouse came down… and then we were attacked… I should have…”

“But you thought you were the only one who could carry the news,” said Cinnabar Quicksilver, who had been silent thus far. “We understand, son. Was Dolomite still holding his section when you went past? Think. He was? Good—now go and find the quartermaster’s fire, and he’ll give you something to drink and a place to lie down. We’ll get help to Jasper and the rest.”

“Th-thank you, Magister.”

As the young soldier limped off, Malachite Copper had already begun finding reinforcements to help Sledge Jasper and the rest keep their withdrawal back to Ocher Bar from turning into a rout.

“I wish you had not done that, Magister,” Vansen quietly told Cinnabar. “He deserted his fellows. He did not even wait to see if his commanding officer had survived…”

“These are not true soldiers, Captain,” Cinnabar reminded him. “They are brave men, but they have not learned the ways of an army. I don’t think they will, either—we just don’t have the time. But I will do my best in the future to let you discipline them as you see fit.”

Now Vansen felt a little ashamed. He was not a Funderling so he could not understand them—was that what Cinnabar was trying to tell him? Ferras Vansen swallowed his resentment. This was not the time.

As more of Jasper and Dolomite’s troops arrived, they told a story much the same as the first frightened warder’s, but with an unexpected ending.

“The autarch’s men did not follow us or press their advantage as we fell back,” the survivors reported. “They did not even follow us down the passages toward Ocher Bar and try to keep us from reaching the rest of you here!”

Vansen could make little sense of it. “They had the perfect chance to destroy almost half our force as we retreated. Why not?”

When Dolomite and Sledge Jasper at last returned, limping and bloody but more or less whole, they confirmed what the others had been saying. They stood with Vansen and the rest looking over the maps Chert had made, trying to understand the southerners’ intention.

“See, they have come under the bay from the mainland on Stormstone’s secret road, the Great Delve,” Malachite Copper said, making a few quick strokes on the map with a piece of charcoal. “But if they wish to move on Funderling Town and then continue up to the castle, why should they turn down through Iron Reach? That way leads nowhere except into the depths.”

Cinnabar frowned. “They will not even be able to circle around behind us without a great effort and much engineering. They would have to go miles through the narrowest of tunnels to come at the temple any other way!”

Vansen’s eyes grew wide. “Perin’s Hammer!” he swore. “So it’s true—the autarch is headed for the Mysteries themselves!”

“Which leaves us little time to make a terrible decision,” said Cinnabar. “Leaves me little time, to be frank, since I carry the Astion here for the Guild.” He frowned in dismay. “Another few hours and the autarch’s men may have driven down past us here in Ocher Bar. After that we will be unable to accomplish anything more than harrying them from behind.” He hung his head and stared hopelessly at the maps. “What other choices do we have? Captain, where are these fairies who claimed they were our allies?”

Vansen knew enough of Cinnabar now to know how agonizing this responsibility was to him, and also how few men of any height he would rather have trusted to make the judgment. “The Qar have sent no word yet of what they plan, but I’ll send another messenger to them. Then we can only wait,” Vansen told them. “But in the meantime, Magister, you must decide what your people will do next. Let the autarch go by, and concede them the Mysteries while we retreat to defend Funderling Town?” He raised his hand as Cinnabar and Jasper both groaned aloud. “I know that cuts you to the heart.”

“It is the Funderlings’ Mount Xandos,” said Chaven suddenly and loudly. “Their holiest place.”

“I know,” Vansen told him. “Let me finish, Chaven Makaros. We can let them go and save our small force to protect Funderling Town, or we can make a stand below Five Arches and try to keep them out of the Mysteries. We would at least have the advantage of knowing the terrain.”

“But with the numbers and weapons they have, they will overwhelm us at last,” said Malachite Copper. “No matter how well we fight, they will push us back—that is inevitable.”

“Yes, and when they push us, we will give way,” Vansen said, “—but slowly, and we will kill as many as we can. If we cannot win,” and suddenly he thought of his family, nearly all lost now, and the princess who had been lost to him from the moment of his humble birth, “well, then, I would just as soon die here with you lot as with any others.”

“You honor us, Captain Vansen,” Cinnabar told him with a sad smile, “but are those truly our only choices? Give up our most sacred place or resist and be massacred? That is grim.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a shining circle of black stone, reverently touching it to his chest before setting it down on the table. “You see that I have taken out the Astion—the seal of the Guild is now on all our talk. Let us hear more about each choice… and do not hold back your opinions! I won’t sleep well no matter which I choose, but like anything painful that can’t be avoided, I say the sooner broken the sooner mended. By the Elders! I wish Chert Blue Quart was here, since we also have that mad proposal of his to consider.” Cinnabar sighed. “Ah, well, nothing to do but make cement with the sand we have. Tell me all so I can decide how we should die.”

Ash Nitre was the younger brother of Sulphur, the temple’s most ancient monk, but that certainly didn’t make him young: Chert thought he looked a bit like one of those dessicated frogs sometimes found in a pocket of metamorphic stone. Brother Ash’s mind seemed lively, though, and his movements were, if not graceful, at least purposeful. This was important because he was in charge of an operation that would kill scores of Funderlings if it went wrong.

“I don’t understand you, boy,” Nitre said—the first time Chert had been called that in as long as he could remember. The monk wore eye shields of thick mica crystal—his eyes seemed big as silver coins. “What do you want with more blasting powder?” He gestured to the open area behind him where at least a dozen temple brothers were busily engaged. “I’ve already got my workers making as much as they can for bombards.…”

“But we need more.”

“How much?” Nitre asked.

Chert had made calculations, but he did not trust them very far. The problem was, blasting powder had never quite been used this way, so it was very hard to guess how much was necessary. Chert would have liked Chaven’s help—the physician knew a lot about many different things—but he was hard to find these days: Chert assumed he was busy helping Captain Vansen.

“Well, Blue Quartz? I do have work to do, you know.” Nitre and the temple brothers he employed were in charge of the dangerous task of crafting the blasting powder in careful allotments, because it was dangerous to store—too dry and any spark might set it off, too damp and all the labor of mining the materials and making the deadly black powder had been ruined. Already, with the need to store large quantities to make into weapons, the Funderlings had moved into unknown territory. They were about to move farther in that direction.

“Perhaps… two hundred barrels?”

Nitre’s eyes went so wide behind the eye shields that his lids and lashes disappeared. “Two hundred? Did you say ‘two hundred’? Are you mad? I am laboring to produce half that much—you cannot simply shovel these powders together, you know! Have you ever seen a rocket like the ones the upgrounders shoot into the sky during the Zosimia festivals? Imagine something hundreds of times that strong, in our confined spaces down here.…”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Chert took a deep breath and produced Cinnabar’s letter with the imprint of the Astion prominently displayed. “Nevertheless, I need as much as you can make for me, as quickly as you can make it.”

“Ridiculous. Sorry, Blue Quartz, but it simply can’t be done. You tell the Guild they would have to send me another two dozen workers just to sift powders. And I know, because of my own requests that they cannot do that—they do not have even a man to spare.”

Chert sat for a long moment in silence. It had been a very strange idea in the first place, a last-ditch sort of thing. He could not expect to pull workers away from making powder for the fighting, especially when the situation seemed to be growing more desperate by the hour. As the monk had said, there simply weren’t enough workers.

“I have a question, Brother Nitre,” Chert suddenly said. “Is there any reason blasting powder has to be made by men… ?”

“I fear this decision,” said Cinnabar Quicksilver. “No matter what we do, something will be broken beyond mending.”

Brother Nickel made an unhappy noise, a cross between a sniff and a grunt. He had been summoned from the temple, which had not pleased him, but the discovery of what was being decided pleased him even less. “Seems to me,” he said now, “that we Metamorphic Brothers have already seen our lives and peace broken beyond mending, and we have not complained.”

“By the Elders, Nickel, you have done nothing but complain,” said Malachite Copper. “And now that the decision is on us you want to complain again before you have even heard it!”

“Peace, you two,” said Cinnabar. “You are not making this any easier. Chaven, you have said almost nothing the whole time we have discussed this. Have you nothing to offer?”

The physician blew out air. “I wish I did, Magister Quicksilver. Either way, we will all do what we must.”

Cinnabar clapped his hands. “Then as the bearer of the Astion, speaking on behalf of our sovereign Stonecutter’s Guild, I feel we have no choice—we have to fight them and fight them now. We must try to keep them from the Mysteries.

“I know that the odds are terrible—if I were a wagering man, I would feel a fool to put a single copper chip on our chances. But everything we have heard says that the autarch has a fascination with our sacred depths, and priests and wizards with him who have filled his head with ideas about gods and black magic. We cannot take the chance there is truth to their ideas. And, more than anything else, we cannot give up our holiest places without a fight. The Elders in their stony beds would curse and condemn us, and who could blame them?

“No, we must resist them as best we can. We are only a thousand, perhaps two with the men still coming, but we will have the Qar beside us—I think you have all seen their mettle.” He lowered his head for a moment, picked up the Astion and stared at it, then tucked it back into his shirt. “We defend the Mysteries. That is my decision.”

“So the temple is to be abandoned… ?” said Brother Nickel, but he sounded more resigned than angry.

“We will leave some token force,” Cinnabar told him. “But if the autarch behaves as the Qar say he will, he’ll show little interest in the temple or even in Funderling Town.”

“This underground invasion is not meant to deliver the castle,” said Vansen. “We can see now that it’s the thing Sulepis came here to do. He broke great Hierosol in a matter of weeks. I find it hard to believe he could not do the same with Southmarch itself, at which point everything beneath it would be his as well, and he could starve us all out. So there is clearly some hurry to what he does, as Yasammez and the Qar suggested, something which drives him swiftly forward when there might be easier ways to reach his goal.”

Copper turned to Vansen. “Why aren’t the Qar here at this council, Captain?”

“I can’t tell you.” Vansen stood. “The Qar—as always, I suspect—will come in their own time. What is important is that we now have Magister Cinnabar’s decision. If you’ll pardon me, I have much to do and time is short—the southerners will be moving again soon.” He turned to the others. “We will meet here after the hour of the evening meal. May the gods protect us and protect Southmarch. And Funderling Town,” he added quickly.

“We will certainly need help from somewhere,” said Chaven.

“The Qar must come,” Vansen said quietly, almost to himself. “We will fail without them.”

18. Exiles and Firstborn

The boat lifted and sagged on the waves of Brenn’s Bay, and the silhouette of the castle grew ever larger against the moon.

Barrick’s vision seemed much sharper than he remembered, even from the previous night. The very stones of the castle’s seawalls seemed to glow; not with light but with intensity of color and detail he could see even in the evening dark from hundreds of ells away. And as his eyes moved across every crack in every stone he could feel the history of the place breathing out at him from the depths, amazing true tales of the gods and their servants that sprang from his deepest memory as if they had grown there in the dark like mushrooms.

Ancient stories told that Hiliometes himself had entered here once, tasked by Mesiya the moon goddess to steal the golden hawk that watched over her and kept her a virtual prisoner of her husband Kernios. And in an earlier day, before mortals had even come to the land, Erivor had fought the monstrous serpent-bull Androphagas here and stabbed it to the heart with his barbed spear. Some claimed that the body of Androphagas had become Midlan’s Mount, but the Elementals declared that the Mount had been here always.

The Last Hour of the Ancestor, as the Qar called Southmarch, was a place that only a few of the Twilight folk had visited in recent centuries, but it was old and strong in their lore. Their knowledge of it—as well as their fear of it, and their fierce, painful longing for it—enfolded everything Barrick saw like a heavy mist, but with Ynnir’s largely silent help, he was learning ways to live with it. Back in Qul-na-Qar he had stopped thinking almost entirely so that he could cope with the strangeness of these new memories; now Barrick Eddon was beginning to take his first cautious steps toward letting the Fireflower become a true part of him.

As he stared at the shadowy walls and the jumbled granite boulders of the shoreline, wondering how they would enter a castle under siege, Barrick suddenly realized where they were going—it all but bloomed in his head. “The Sea Postern,” he said out loud.

Saqri turned to look at him and then returned her serene gaze to the water. The moonlight behind her made her look as still as a painted wooden figurehead.

The walls now loomed high above them. Rafe carefully began to bring the pitching boat in close to the boulders of the breakfront, which were stacked in haphazard piles like the telling-stones of giants. As the side of the boat scraped on granite, Rafe reached out one long arm and found something beneath the water, then tied his boat to it. A moment later he had clambered up onto the piled rocks, a dim, tall shape that began to turn into stories of the entire Skimmer race if Barrick stared too long and too incautiously. Rafe climbed a short distance and then grabbed a wide, irregular chunk of stone that looked a little like a juggler’s tenpin, bigger near the water than at the top, bottom hidden in the splashing waves. The young Skimmer reached around behind it and popped something loose—a hidden latch that protected it against being moved by tides and storms.

“Hold tight, all you,” Rafe said. “ ’Be a splash.”

He swung his weight against it, and the stone began to tip downward. Barrick knew what was going to happen but it was still astonishing to see. The stone toppled slowly toward the water, but with the slow precision of one of the bronze Funderlings on the great Market Square clock swinging his bronze hammer. The stone itself was only the visible half; a stone counterweight of almost exactly the same weight lay underneath the water on the other end of the ancient lever, so that a single strong man or woman could open the Sea Postern if they only knew where the latch was hidden.

The stone tipped down into the bay heavily enough to make the boat bob like a curl of bark. Rafe made his way back to his craft, untied it, and steered it through the opening. Before they had drifted more than a few yards past the opening the young Skimmer tied the boat up again, then caught a rope that hung down from the darkness above and swung easily onto a stone in the middle of the narrow watercourse. His weight on it pushed it beneath the water, which brought the other stone back up to cover the entrance, and suddenly all light was gone but for a tiny gleam trickling down from above. Other than the black watercourse beneath them, they were entirely surrounded by stone.

Rafe got back into the boat and lit and hung a lantern in the bow, then used one of his oars as a pole to move them through the narrow crevice. Barrick felt completely encased, as though the stone that surrounded him were the body of a living thing, a sleeping ogre or dragon.

But Southmarch was a living thing, he realized for the first time. It was not the Qar voices that told him so, because to Fireflower phantoms everything in the world was as alive or dead as everything else—being “dead” or “alive” was, they seemed to feel, a largely meaningless distinction. Barrick didn’t know why he suddenly knew it, too, or why it seemed so significant, but Southmarch was indeed alive, and in a way that almost nothing else was. It was alive because it was full of doorways, and it was full of doorways because it was curiously, even uniquely alive. The gods, the Qar, even the late-coming humans, had not made this place the heart of so many happenings. They had all come here because the place itself was as vital as a beating heart.

How had he lived here all his life and never known that? How had his own ancestors lived here for so many centuries and not recognized it? Because they could see only the colors they had been given to see. But now that had changed, at least for him.

Barrick could see it now, at least a little, but could he make sense of it? And would it make any difference if he could?

The short trip along the watercourse was a dreamlike inversion of their trip from M’Helan’s Rock, but the waves that rose above them this time were not made of water but of dark granite sprinkled with white limestone foam. They followed their own lantern light through a tunnel of naked rock until they found themselves at last prevented from going forward by a heavy iron grille set in a wall of dressed stones. On all sides, stone-and-clay water pipes opened out of the walls, although in this season they all seemed dry.

Rafe gestured toward the heavy grille, thick with rust and mud. “Beyond lie the backwaters of the castle, under the Lagoonside houses and suchnot. Then comes the lagoon. But you’ll not be going there. Far too dangerous for such as you, Your Majesty.” He looked at Barrick and frowned in confusion. “Your Majesties, I should say, Egye-Var’s pardon on me.”

“And so… ?” Barrick asked him.

“We wait.” Rafe seemed pleased to be able to announce this. He sat back in the bow with his long, thin arms crossed. The Rooftoppers in their box murmured in anxious voices to each other, so that Barrick felt as though he sat beside a hive of sighing bees. “Some are coming to lead us the rest of the way.”

They did not wait long. Barrick heard their approach even before Rafe did, and saw them as they approached the end of the pipe, their little torches glowing; none brighter than an Orphan’s Day taper. It was another crowd of Rooftoppers—hundreds, as far as he could tell, crowding up against the lip of the pipe.

Rafe stood up abruptly, which made the small boat rock, then lifted out the box and its surprised passengers. He put it down carefully on the brick ledge beside the canal and opened the door along its bottom. The first Rooftopper guards filed out, looking around warily, followed shortly by the impressive if slightly rumpled figure of Duke Kettlehouse.

A squadron of Rooftopper engineers, as if prepared, dropped a ramp into place to bridge the difference of height between the end of the pipe and the brick ledge, then the rest of the Rooftoppers made their way down it, most on foot, but a few dozen seated on hopping birds. The last one to hop forward was the most decorated, and its passenger wore a tremendous headdress on top of her curly red hair. A tiny man stepped out in front of her and held up an equally tiny speaking-trumpet. “Greetings, Saqri of the Fireflower, great Queen. Her Uproarious Highness Queen Upsteeplebat of Rooftop, Wainscoting, and Rooftop-Over-Sea bids you welcome back to your home, Saqri of the Ancient Song.”

Welcome back? wondered Barrick, but then a moment later he saw it as if he had been there himself—which something that was now part of him had, he realized—the young Saqri, slim as a birch tree, hair dark as the space between stars, walking along an ancient passage that wound down into the depths beneath Southmarch… Beyond this image, like a succession of mirrors looking on the reflections of other mirrors, the daughters of Crooked’s blood, all the queens of Qul-na-Qar, stretched back along those same stairs, each one individual, but also part of a single, many-legged thing that spread forward and backward through time… or at least backward.

Because there may never be another, said a voice in his head, a clear, familiar voice. It ends with her…

Ynnir? he asked, if one could truly ask anything of another part of one’s own heart and thoughts. But the blind king’s presence was gone again.

“You are kind, sister,” Saqri said in her calm, quiet voice. Far below her, Upsteeplebat smiled as Saqri continued: “It has been too long since our two peoples met in concord.”

The gathered Rooftoppers, even Kettlehouse’s people, made little murmurs of approval and contentment. Barrick could only guess how important it was to such small creatures to be treated as equals.

The little queen took the speaking-trumpet from her herald. “We have much to speak about,” Upsteeplebat said to Saqri. “But first we have other business, if you will forgive us.”

“Of course.” Saqri nodded.

“Duke Kettlehouse—my dear uncle, you are most welcome back!” said the Rooftopper’s queen.

Kettlehouse stepped toward her as her grooms helped her down from her beautiful gray dove. She waited for him as he approached, then watched as he at last knelt before her. “I thank the Lord of the Peak heartily for this happy day.”

The little queen bent and threw her arms around the bearded man’s neck, encouraging him to stand, then kept her grip on him for a long moment. “Too long have the tides splashed between us,” she said. “Now our family is whole again.”

A great cheer went up from the assembled Rooftoppers—Old Duke Kettlehouse even seemed to be weeping, but he waved his arms and shouted, “So be it! Huzzah for the Wainscoting! Huzzah for the Great Green Drapery! We are one again!”

“Come, then,” said Queen Upsteeplebat when the shouting had died down, remounting her dove. “We have prepared a place for all of you in the tunnels beneath the castle. We will settle you and feed you, then we shall talk of how we can aid you, great Queen of the People.” She turned to smile at Barrick as well. “You and the other noble guardian of the Fireflower.” She waved and the entire contingent of Rooftoppers, mounted and afoot, men at arms, women, children, and old people mounted back up their ramp and into the circle of the great clay pipe. The engineers stayed behind to dismantle their ramp, but even they finished and left in what felt like a very short time.

“Where did they go?” Barrick said.

“We will see Upsteeplebat again, and soon,” Saqri told him.

“But why didn’t they… why aren’t we… ?”

“Didn’t say we were waiting for them, did I?” said Rafe, who had hung back during the meeting. “Just said we were waiting.”

“So who are we waiting for, then?” Barrick asked, but Saqri did not answer.

Rafe spoke in her place. “Somebody else,” he said, grinning. “Oh, aye, somebody well else.”

The farmer’s wife was reluctant to let Qinnitan go. “Are you certain, child? If you stay, you can eat with us again tonight.”

Qinnitan wished she spoke the language better. “No. But thanking. And for the carrying, thanking, too.” She clambered down out of the wagon. She had encountered this Blueshore farming family on the road and had bartered the dead priest’s donkey to them for lodging, food, and clothes during the time it had taken them all to reach this town on the eastern edge of Brenn’s Bay. The farmer, who was asking a port reeve where in Onir Beccan’s fish market the wagon could be set up, nodded to her. Three of the family’s four children were asleep after the long day’s ride, but the oldest shyly waved farewell.

She walked through the center of the town but passed by the market, continuing instead until she reached the town walls and could look down at the port, which stretched away north for a little distance along the intricate coast of the wide bay. Surely somewhere in this muddle of ships, she could hire someone with the money she’d stolen from Daikonas Vo who would take her away from here without asking questions. If Vo had been carrying her to the autarch’s camp at Southmarch then she would be happy to get on almost anything going in the opposite direction. But what after that? She could never set foot in Xis again—to do so would almost certainly mean death. But Hierosol, the only other city she knew, was also in the autarch’s power. Where else could she go?

Qinnitan stared across the bay toward the sunset skies over Southmarch Castle. Every now and then a dim thump flew to her on the wind—it had only just occurred to her that she was hearing cannons firing. Those must be the autarch’s guns, the same ones Sulepis had used to level the walls of Hierosol. And here she stood, separated from him only by the width of the water! She flinched a little and took a step back, as though he might suddenly reach out all the way from the farther shore.

Anywhere but here, she told herself. Anywhere but this close.

The Onir Beccan Market was the best and biggest fish market in all of Blueshore, and the healthy portion it took from all the catches sold there by fishermen from all the cities along Brenn’s Bay had been enriching the ruling Aldritch family for at least two centuries. It was a bustling, successful place, oddly no less so now even with war on its doorstep, and it was the first real city she had seen since Agamid. As Qinnitan walked through the marketplace between arguing Blueshoremen, hurrying cooks, ostlers and innkeepers and drunken Marrinswalk sailors, she was reminded of the seafront in Great Xis, a place she seen only once since she was a child, on the night of her escape from the Seclusion. Perhaps it would not seem so impressive now, but as she remembered the port’s mad crush of people and the sights and sounds and smells that could exist together nowhere else on earth, she felt a terrible pang of homesickness for the places where she had grown up and the people she had known as a child. But her parents had all but sold her, she reminded herself, and her childhood friend Jeddin had nearly gotten her killed, so what exactly was she missing?

Still, she had certainly been happy at the docks. She remembered one time she had gone with her father when he had to speak about a job for her older brother. While he was talking to the dock factor, little Qinnitan had wandered off and spent a blissful time alone in a world of dreams and miracles and mysteries. She had seen a man selling monkeys and another selling parrots, and then one of the monkeys had got loose and climbed up among the parrots and what screaming and shouting there had been! She had also seen a real witch, a woman being carried along the waterfront on a litter by two bearers, an old, cruel woman weighted down with necklaces of gold, with a face like a sea turtle, and everywhere she passed, the people behind her turned away and made the pass-evil sign, or spat on the ground.

Qinnitan had also seen a man dancing on crutches even though he had no legs, and another who could set his skin on fire and then blow it out again, both performing for coppers. She saw children singing and dancing, too, and many of them did not seem to have parents. Young as she was, she had still been a little envious of them.

Now, ten or more years later, far away from her home or even any thought of having a home, she again touched the feeling from that long-ago day, being alone but not lonely, of being solitary and yet sufficient. Because what else was there to… ?

Qinnitan banged into something and suddenly found herself tangled in a heavy cloak or cloth. Her arms caught, she lost her balance and fell, and something large stumbled over her, driving her knee and elbow into the stony cobbles so that she cried out in pain and even cursed a little.

It was only when the man yanked his cloak away from her, almost knocking her over again, that she realized she had collided with a soldier and made him fall. His friends, three more soldiers, helped him up.

She was confused and frightened by the way they all stared at her, but it was only when one of the soldiers said, “She curses in the name of Nushash!” in perfect Xixian that she realized she must have said something in her native language.

Before she could even begin to guess what four Xixian soldiers were doing in a fish market in Blueshore, they had surrounded her.

“What a funny thing to find in the middle of nowhere,” another soldier said, also in flawless Xixian, accented ever so slightly with the vowel sounds of the southern desert. “A sweet little girl from home. She could be your sister, Paka.”

“Watch your tongue,” growled the one who must have been Paka. “This little whore is no sister of mine.” He grabbed Qinnitan’s arm and began to hurry her across the wide market. “But she does have a few questions to answer. Don’t you fools remember? We’re supposed to have our eyes out for girls this age who speak Xixian—that’s straight from the Golden One’s minister. If you’d let her go, we’d have been facing the torture-priests.”

The other guards, trotting after him now, lowered their heads and muttered in shamefaced piety at the mention of the autarch’s name.

Qinnitan could not believe her ill luck. Panicked, she tried to break away, but Paka the sergeant had her tight.

“No use struggling,” he told her. “You’ll just get hurt.”

When they came out of the darkness at last it was not in martial procession like the Rooftoppers, but in a small group—Yasammez, dark as a crow’s wing, her chief eremite Aesi’uah (the name drifted into Barrick’s thoughts like an echo), and two hulking shapes—Deep Ettins, the Fireflower whispered to Barrick, the largest of them no less important a figure than Hammerfoot of Firstdeeps.

For a moment Saqri and her many-times-great-aunt only stood looking at each other, then Saqri stepped toward her and extended her hands to Yasammez. Their fingers met and they both stopped again, but what passed between them was deeper than any embrace. It went on and on, a river of meaning passing silently between them.

Barrick watched, unmoving. Rafe the Skimmer caught his eye and grinned as if this momentous reunion were some kind of surprise the Skimmer youth had arranged all by himself. The giant Hammerfoot’s expression was harder to read, even with the whispers of insight that flooded Barrick’s skull, but it was not hard to see dislike and distrust in the creature’s deep-sunken eyes and sour expression.

Saqri and Yasammez finally stepped away from each other, so Barrick could compare them side-by-side. The family resemblance was unmistakable, but so were the differences: although at first glance neither of them looked to be out of the prime of womanhood, Saqri had a softer, more rounded face. Yasammez had the look of a predator, her nose strong, her cheekbones high and sharp, her eyes tilted up at the outer corners as if she stood in a perpetual wind. Her black armor—she wore every piece except a helmet—added to her dangerous appearance.

Now she looked Barrick up and down. “I could not have believed that the Book could contain such a strange chapter, yet here you are again.” Yasammez spoke aloud, each word like the chime of cold steel. “I had meant only to show Ynnir what the sacred Fireflower had come to in the veins of mortal murderers, but he has bested me again. The Lord of Winds and Thought must be the cleverest coward who ever lived.”

“He is no coward,” Saqri said calmly, “and it is too soon to assess what he has done, but it seems premature to judge his actions.”

“You always had a soft spot for your brother,” Yasammez said. “Even when I told you he would bring destruction on all our line. Can you pretend I was wrong?”

“As I said, it seems too early to judge.” Saqri bowed her head for a moment. “But I would prefer not to argue with you in any case, my great and beloved. Let us see what we have and what we may yet do. Later there will be time to talk of who was right and who was wrong.”

Yasammez could not have made her distaste for this more plain, but still her pale face remained as expressionless as a mask beneath her tangle of dark hair. “Later there may be time only to die,” Yasammez said. “However, that is not the way to greet kin, and not the way I wish to greet you, my only heart.” And without saying anything more she turned and walked away into the shadows. After a moment, Saqri and Barrick followed.

“I’ll just go and tell my folk that it’s all begun, shall I?” Rafe called after them. “Tell them to send folks as like to flap lips to join the war council.”

Barrick didn’t know what to say, and none of the Qar seemed to feel a need to reply.

“Right, so,” said the Skimmer cheerfully. “I’ll get to it, then.”

They were beneath Southmarch—beneath even Funderling Town! Barrick had never suspected there was anything beneath the Funderlings’ underground city except stone. Surely they must be in the very roots of the earth now!

As Barrick sat on cushions on the floor of Yasammez’ tent, with Saqri and the tent’s mistress again locked in deep, silent communication, he could feel the whole history of the place, or at least as much history as was known to the last Qar who walked the same earth as the gods did. He knew that Kernios—Earth Father—had met his end here at the hands of Crooked, the clever god whom mortals called Kupilas. He knew that the cavern in which this tent stood, surrounded by the Qar camp, had once been known as “Glittering Delights,” and had served as the garden of Immon, the gatekeeper, although that version of the cavern was no longer visible (or at least only appeared at extremely irregular intervals.)

Saqri sat up straighter. She had put on something more martial, a less spiny version of the armor Yasammez wore, its cream-colored plates trimmed with different shades of gray and blue. “I do not know why you still keep so much hidden from me,” Saqri said, and the fact that Barrick heard her say it was evidence that she wanted it heard.

“Because you are not yet yourself.” Yasammez’ tone was stern but Barrick’s deepened understanding could also detect a note of unhappy need—almost a plea.

“May I know the subject?” he asked. “Perhaps Lady Yasammez—to whom I am grateful for having my life spared, of course—now thinks I would have been better off as a dead example than as a live prince. But I am here, and for better or worse your Fireflower now burns in my veins—mine, Lady. So please, talk to me if you value my goodwill. I grow tired of wondering what’s afoot.”

Saqri actually smiled, although it might have been purely perfunctory. “Wait only a few moments more—talking, in large part for your benefit, Barrick Eddon, is just what we are about to do.…”

Even as she said it, folk began filing into the large tent, silent and watchful as deer, although with some the silence was distinctly more threatening. Elementals swathed in runecloths but still leaking radiance, bright-eyed Tricksters, Changers, Stone Circle People (each of whom might have been the twin of little Harsar back in Qul-na-Qar) goblins and drows and Mountain Korbols all entered in groups of two or three and spread themselves along the perimeter of the tent. They were followed by a contingent of Skimmers. Rafe was one of them, and he was carrying the box from his boat. Although the light in the tent was dim, Barrick could see at least a dozen Rooftoppers standing at the rail of the box like passengers on a ship watching for the approaching shore.

But where are the Funderlings? he wondered.

“Hear me!” a loud, clear voice said from behind them in the ordinary tongue of Southmarch mortals. It was Aesi’uah, Yasammez’s chief eremite, but her mistress did not even look up as the counselor spoke. “On behalf of my lady Yasammez, I bid you lay down your weapons and your feuds—all peaceful folk have safe welcome in this house.” The words echoed in Barrick’s mind, a time-lost traditional greeting, a memory of more warlike days that now seemed to have come again.

“The Autarch Sulepis’ army is outside the castle walls,” Aesi’uah continued. “He has brought machines the world has not seen since the gods’ day, great guns that smash the stone like a hammer. He has bred monsters. He has even bred living children of the Exile to use like beasts, all so that he can raise the god he thinks is Whitefire—Sulepis calls him Nushash—from eternal sleep and force him to wield his matchless strength on the autarch’s behalf.” She bowed her head for a moment. “He has studied and prepared carefully. We believe he has the power to do just what he intends.”

“But how could he command a god even if he could wake one?” said a Skimmer man, standing up. “Egye-var speaks to us through the sisters and the Scale, but we could no more tame him than we could tame the watery ocean itself.”

“The southerner believes he has a way to force the god to do his bidding,” said Saqri, speaking up from her seat beside Yasammez. “The ripples of his exploration—with apologies to Turley Longfingers and his beloved ocean—could be felt in the Deep Library, and even by some of the more sensitive still among the living.” She paused in an odd way, and Barrick suddenly sensed that she spoke of herself—that her own long, long sleep and the dreams that had come with it had not always been peaceful or pleasant. “We do not know how this mortal plans to control a god, but we believe after everything else he has done, it would be foolish to assume he cannot accomplish it.”

“So, if it pleases my fellow monarchs,” little Queen Upsteeplebat called out through her speaking-trumpet, “what is the point of our all being here? The autarch has already plunged down past these halls and is moving in the deeps with his men, forcing his way downward to the Funderlings’ sacred place—to the Shining Man.”

“It is not only the Funderlings’ sacred place,” said Saqri. “No matter which gods we chose to follow, he who is prisoned in the Shining Man saved us all from continuing enslavement. Without him, the gods would yet rule us.”

“Would that have been so bad, Mistress?” asked Turley the Skimmer. “Our god speaks often-like to us and it’s done us naught but good.”

“It could be that you misremember what it was like when the sea god could take a more active interest in things,” Saqri said. “But I will grant that he was always the most peaceful of the brothers—his power came not just from his strength but also from his wisdom. In any case, it is not the return of the gods we fear, though it is something worth fearing, as much as the more frightful idea of a mortal madman controlling an immortal’s power.”

Aesi’uah spoke again, relating things Barrick had already heard but with new details which had clearly been learned only recently, like the story of the autarch’s visit to M’Helan’s Rock and conversation with Hendon Tolly, which the Dreamless woman now reported word for word in her calm, clear voice. She, and occasionally Saqri, also spoke of things Barrick had not heard, or had heard only imperfectly, retelling the tale of Crooked and his destruction of the gods in such a way that it seemed almost entirely different from the version the raven Skurn had told him, full of strange details which raised quiet Fireflower echoes in his thoughts.

From time to time the Skimmers and the tiny people called Rooftoppers chimed in as well, and Barrick began to grasp how little he had truly known about his father’s kingdom, especially its capitol, when he lived in Southmarch.

“A question occurs to us,” Queen Upsteeplebat said at last. “Where are the Funderlings? Where are the stonecutters? The children of Egye-Var are here, as are those of us who worship the Lord of the Peak.…” She gestured to her Rooftoppers. “But where are the minions of old Karisnovois, King of the Mud and the Rock?”

Aesi’uah turned to look at her mistress, Yasammez, but it was Saqri the queen who spoke instead.

“That is part of the reason we are here,” Saqri told her. “The Funderlings are at this moment far below us, fighting to protect the deep place they call the Mysteries from the autarch and his thousands—the place we call Ancestor’s Blood.”

“What do you mean, fighting? Below us?” Barrick didn’t like the sound of that at all. “We sit here talking when this autarch is already in the depths?”

Yasammez stirred. “Too late to pretend innocence, last bearer,” she told Barrick coldly. “Come out and speak or hold your peace.” After this cryptic remark, she stared at him for a long moment, then lowered her dark, dark eyes once more.

“We would hear the answer that this young man seeks,” said Upsteeplebat. “But first we would know his name.”

It was bizarre for Barrick to realize he could be in a meeting of nearly a hundred souls in his own castle—or at least beneath it—but not be recognized. He bowed toward the tiny, handsome woman. “I am Barrick Eddon, son of King Olin, Majesty. I am a prince… now the only prince… of Southmarch.”

The murmur of surprise that rose seemed laced with more than a few angry mutters. Most of the latter seemed to be coming from the Skimmers. Turley, their leader, turned to Barrick with a worried look.

“Your pardon that we didn’t recognize you, Prince Barrick. My daughter speaks well of your family—especially your sister, whom she helped leave the castle.”

“My sister? Briony?” It had taken a moment for his sister’s name to come to him. Briony seemed… diminished now, somehow, her place in his memory and thoughts smaller than it had been in the past, as though a mist had flowed between them. “Is she truly here?”

“She lives,” said Saqri. “But I cannot discover where she is. These days the restlessness of the sleeping gods disrupts all the gifts of Grandmother Void, but what have become most difficult are far-seeing and far-talking.” She spread her hands—The Sea is Calm. “Later I will tell you all I know… but right now we have more pressing matters than even sisters and brothers.” She looked at Yasammez as though she would say something to her ancestor, but then turned back to the rest of those watching. “The Funderlings and the men who fight with them are far below us in the place they call the Maze, making a stand against Sulepis and all his men and monsters. The hour is fast dying when we can still help them directly. Thus we come to what we think will be the final struggle.”

“But that is why we have joined together,” said Upsteeplebat through her speaking-trumpet. The tent quieted so everyone could hear her. “The Exiles and the Firstborn, the commoners and the high ones of the Fireflower—we have joined together to fight for our home. Why do we waste time talking?” She pulled a tiny streak of silver from a sheath and lifted it high. “I pledge my sword as a token of my people’s willingness to risk their lives in the service of this goal.”

The roar of shrill cheers from the box was drowned out by Turley Longfingers, who rose yet again to say, “All well and good, but why should we? What benefits our clans when we could be away before the next tide and find elsewhere to fish and ply our crafts?”

“There is more to a decision to fight with us…” Saqri began, but Yasammez abruptly rose to her feet beside her, swift and ominous as a black cloud scudding in from the horizon.

“The water-man is right that this is no fight for his people,” Yassamez declared, “but he is wrong about the reason.” She looked around the room from her thicket of armored spikes, her anger almost visible. Some of the mortals actually cringed as her gaze touched them. “The reason the Skimmers should not fight—that none of you should fight—is because there is no point. Victory cannot be snatched from the jaws of this failure because these are the final moments of the Long Defeat. Ancient apologies should be made and accepted by those…” she looked directly at Saqri,”… who believe in such things. But the rest of you might just as well return to your families to spend your last hours with them. There is no cure for this disease. There is nothing ahead of us but death.” Her long pale fingers rose to the ember-red stone on her breast. “So I declare as holder of the Seal of War.” She said this not in anger, but with calm and horrifying certainty. “Those who ignore me will learn soon enough that I speak the truth.”

And then Yasammez turned and walked from the tent, leaving open mouths and silence behind her.

19. Mummery

Ferras Vansen could barely sit still. “Where are they? Where are the Qar? I thought we had an understanding!” The fearsome Yasammez was beyond anyone’s understanding, of course, but her councillor Aesi’uah had as much as promised Vansen that the Qar would fight side side by side with Vansen and the Funderlings—after all, what else could the Twilight folk do?

“I do not mind waiting a little while longer for them,” Cinnabar said. “It will give me time enough time to put on my armor. Where is my son, Calomel? He was going to help me with it.” The magister shook his head mournfully. “I have not worn armor since my youthful days in the warders. Even if it will still fit me, I fear I misremember which strap goes to which buckle… Calomel? Where are you, boy?” When the Funderling youth appeared, his father said, “Go and get it all for me, son. It’s time.” Calomel trotted off.

The guards brought the Qar’s messenger to Vansen and the other commanders.

“Spelter?” said Malachite Copper. “They sent you?”

Vansen glanced up in surprise as the drow entered the makeshift command post. He liked Spelter, but why should the Qar use a humble military scout as their envoy when so many others like Aesi’uah could speak the mortal tongue just as well?

The bearded man bowed, a quick downward flick of his chin. His inscrutable, vulpine face seemed even more blank than usual. “Magisters, Captain—I bring you greetings from Lady Yasammez.”

“I am glad to have her greetings,” Vansen said, “but what I need is to know what’s in her mind. She gave me to understand the autarch was her enemy, too. He is not stopping, and we are falling back to protect the Mysteries.”

“Yes, we know,” said Spelter, nodding once.

“Well, then? Is she coming? Will your mistress stand beside us as she all but promised?”

For a brief moment Vansen glimpsed the unhappiness that had been hidden in Spelter’s dark eyes, perhaps even the twist of a frown in the drow’s beard, and his heart went cold.

“No, Captain,” said Spelter. “She is not.”

“What?” Cinnabar stumbled forward, his vambraces dragging on the floor. “Not coming? But we gave your mistress sanctuary in our own tunnels—we gave you all sanctuary when the autarch came! And this is how she pays us back? Leaving us to fight alone?”

“I am sorry, Magister.” Spelter turned to Vansen and nodded a salute. “Captain.” He kept his back rigid and his eyes staring ahead, even when there was nothing before him to stare at; a soldier was a soldier, it seemed, even among the Qar. “I regret bearing this news. You are brave allies. I can say no more. Good luck.”

Vansen watched the drow walk back across the chaos of the breaking camp. A few of the Funderlings watched him with superstitious fear. Only half a year ago the drows and the Qar had been stories to excite and frighten young children. Now they were real.

Real, but cowardly, Vansen thought in sudden rage. He should have known that Lady Porcupine was too proud and spiteful to be able to overcome her hatred of mortals—he should have known! Now it was he who had betrayed his allies by promising them help that would not come....

“Balls of the Brothers!” he spat, full of fury and shame. “Cinnabar, I’ve failed. I’m prepared to hand the command to Copper right now if you’ll let me.”

“You’ll do nothing like it,” said a startled Malachite Copper, coughing up some of the water he’d been drinking.

“He’s right,” said Cinnabar. “You’ll do nothing like, Captain. We hung you on the marshal’s hoist because you’re the best for the task.” He reached out blindly to take another piece of armor from his son Calomel, but his hands were shaking. “You’ve done nothing to show otherwise. By the Elders, Captain Vansen, do you blame yourself for the Qar not coming? If you had not risked your life to make treaty with them, we’d still be fighting them as well as the filthy, fracturing autarch!” Cinnabar looked upset. “Sorry, lad. Don’t tell your mother I said that in front of you.”

Young Calomel brightened considerably.

Vansen shook his head. “Do not be so quick to exonerate me, Magister. Perhaps the Qar and the autarch would now be fighting each other if I hadn’t interfered.”

“Still and all,” said Copper, “don’t be foolish. No one else would have done differently, but you were the only one who could do it, in any case.”

“Once more our old friend Copper speaks the truth,” Cinnabar agreed, waving his hand. “Enough. Except to say that not only won’t we let you out of your responsibilities, Captain Vansen, my people will long remember what you did for us.” A moment later, he added, “If the Elders decree that my people survive, that is.”

Vansen, who had already been mulling his own version of this, nodded. “A wise soldier never presumes that the gods will reward good intentions.” He felt about to drown in his own misery. “Well, if the fairies aren’t coming, I suppose we need wait no longer. Anything else left to finish here?”

“Me.” Cinnabar, tongue between his teeth, was busy with his high-collared chest plate.

Calomel reached up and helped his father tie the knots. “He’s almost ready, Captain.”

“And he looks very handsome, our Cinnabar,” Malachite Copper said almost cheerfully, as if they had not just been told they were fighting alone. “Not in the least like a fat townsman who has forgotten everything he learned in the warders.”

“Yes, I’m sure one sight of me and the autarch’s men will all run,” said Cinnabar, but no one had the heart to laugh.

He had become an animal, a thing of rough, matted hair and sharp teeth. He could smell her. He knew that the soldiers had taken her across the water—he had her scent and it told him everything. He could even smell the warm blood that would gush forth when he caught her and began to bite and tear…

Daikonas Vo shuddered and blinked. No. He was not an animal. He was a man, even if it was getting harder to remember that sometimes. He looked at the crowd of people around him. Some of them were staring. He could only guess what he looked like. But what was he trying to remember… ?

It came back. The girl. The girl from the Seclusion. He didn’t smell her, that was only his madness speaking, but he had seen the soldiers take her and march her onto a boat headed back across the bay toward Southmarch. He knew where she was going—to the autarch, the wonderful, powerful, treacherous, murderous autarch…

It was important to remember the truth and defend against madness. If Vo lost control, he knew he would become an animal in truth—a dead one, as forgotten as any cur left to rot by the roadside. But there were moments he did feel he could smell the girl, no matter how far away she was—he could almost picture her scent wafting behind her as she ran, trailing in the air like a broken spiderweb, dissolving slowly but lingering just long enough to coil about him like mist, leading him on…

He stopped himself just before he began howling. The sun was bright, and his head felt as though it had been split by a stoneworker’s chisel. The people around him had drawn back, and many were staring at him in apprehension—he must be talking to himself again.

Vo put his head down and began to walk.

She had tried to kill him. That memory helped to keep him going when the pain almost became too much. It was not the worst thing she had done, of course—in fact it was scarcely important at all except as a reminder of how slack he had been. But in trying to murder him she had poured all his sweet black medicine away, the one thing that had quieted the gnawing monstrosity the autarch had left in Vo’s guts. Now the agony grew in him by the hour. Vo had tried other remedies since he had lost his boat, wild simples he had picked in the forest and eaten, and later, when he had reached villages and small towns again, things he could get from apothecaries and healers, simply stealing when he could, killing without hesitation when he had to. But even the most learned of these country healers knew little more than the name of Malamenas Kimir’s healing liquid—they certainly did not have any. If he had not been certain beyond doubt he would be dead before he reached Agamid and Kimir’s shop he would have started back there already; instead he had only one chance to end the burning pain in his guts: he might still be able to convince Sulepis of his usefulness and be released from this endless torture.

So Daikonas Vo walked across the waterfront of Onir Beccan toward the place the ships docked, ignoring the local apothecaries because he could not afford the time or distraction. Every hour it seemed to become harder to think. Sometimes his mind was nothing but a black cave of screeching bats. Sometimes his legs cramped so badly that he dropped helplessly to the ground, but he always got up again.

Somebody was making strange noises. Growling and wheezing, mumbled words.

It was Vo himself, of course. He laughed a little through the pain. It was strange being mad, but he had been through worse.

Vo had been trying to ignore the pain that burned in his gut like a blazing coal while he watched the small ship he planned to board. A crane swung barrels of supplies up onto the deck as half-naked men pulled the ropes and shouted at each other. Could he manage? It seemed unlikely: to judge by the number of Xixian soldiers on the deck the autarch’s army had commandeered the Blueshore cog outright, which would make it hard for Vo to slip aboard unnoticed, especially in his present condition.

It was only after he had reluctantly decided to wait for another ship that he suddenly remembered the parchments that old Vash had given him—the autarch’s writ. The whole memory seemed strange, as though it had happened to someone else, but the documents had served him well when he commandeered the first ship in Hierosol, and could do so again… if he still had them....

Fortunately, Daikonas Vo had not had the wit for most of the last month even to remember the oilskin pouch hidden behind his belt, so it was still there. The documents were still there, too, although a bit smeared and hard to read after his unexpected swim from Vilas’ boat to the Brennish shore. Still, the falcon glyph of Sulepis III was unmistakable, and the bright vermilion ink showed that it was no mere copy but a document approved by the autarch himself. With the waterlogged parchments clutched tight in his fist he headed toward the cog, reminding himself not to howl no matter how hot the sun felt or how his gut burned him.

The mulasim, the officer who came down when the guards at the top of the gangplank called him, was one of those old hands Vo had seen a thousand times. While the mulasim looked skeptically at Vo’s documents, the soldiers behind him stared at Vo himself. He couldn’t even imagine what he looked like, but the part of him that could think through the pain knew it must be bad. They might not doubt the documents themselves, but they were bound to wonder if he had stolen these from the real messenger.

“Hear me,” he said, summoning what felt like a great deal of strength to speak calm, sensible words. “I have taken tremendous injury in the autarch’s service. I have critical information to give him which he needs this moment. I have sworn my complete loyalty to the Golden One. If you refuse to take me to his camp, I will have no choice but to kill you all, then eat your hearts and livers so that I have the strength to swim across Brenn’s Bay.”

Something about the way he said it must have been convincing. When the ship left Onir Beccan on the evening tide, Vo was on board, with a great deal of the deck to himself.

Despite the dangers—and they were many—Matt Tinwright felt exhilarated to be out of the royal residence at night and on his own. Of course as bad as the inner keep had become it was still was nothing like the outer keep, which was so crammed with hungry, terrified people that walking across it at night would be taking your life in your hands even were it not for the destruction being rained down by the autarch’s cannons and the dangerous ruins left in the wake of the cannon fire.

Two days of freedom in a row! Tinwright prayed that Hendon Tolly would continue to be distracted just a bit longer.

He had considered waiting until late to try to sneak into his sister’s house, but the inner keep was almost as crowded with refugees as the outer; if he went during waking hours the noise from the camps would be good cover. He went through an empty shop and climbed out an upstairs window, then clambered across and dropped into a knacker’s yard, also deserted. From there, he made his way into that building and then climbed the stairs to the room at the top that his mother shared with Elan. He watched the street for some time, but could see no one obviously keeping an eye on the place.

To Tinwright’s disappointment, it was his mother who answered his discreet rap at the shutter. She had her triskelion clutched tightly against her stomacher until the shutter was halfway up, then she thrust a fist holding the chain through the gap so suddenly that she hit Tinwright in the chin as he was about to speak.

“The Brothers abjure you, foul demon!” cried Anamesiya Tinwright, then struck him on the ear with the triskelion.

“Sweet Zosim Salamandros, woman, what are you doing?” He tried to keep his voice down, but it still came out in a muffled shriek. “You’ve bloodied my nose! Let me in.”

“Matthias, is that you?” His mother stepped back as he half-clambered, half-fell through the window. “What are you doing at the window, you fool? I thought you were a demon!”

He sat on the floor collecting himself for a moment. “I am not. Do we agree on that? Or would you prefer to hit me again?”

“Matthias?” It was Elan this time, calling not from the bed but from a stool by the table where the single lamp burned. She had been sewing, and she looked so pretty in his sister’s simple clothes that it took him a moment to realize what she had called him. Not Matt, or even Matty, but Matthias. What his mother called him.

“Yes, it’s me.” He got up and dusted himself off, wiped a few drops of blood from his upper lip, then walked over to give Elan’s hand a kiss. “I’ve come to…”

“Do you have my money?” his mother asked. “It was the tennight three days ago.”

It was all Tinwright could do not to shout. He had to remind himself that there might very well be spies, even armed soldiers, watching the building. “I have been more or less Hendon Tolly’s prisoner, Mother, kept at his side morning and night.”

“Oh, so you truly are coming up in the world.” His mother smiled with pleasure. “We heard, but we were not sure…”

“You poor man,” said Elan. “Can you bear it? Is he cruel?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He sat down cross-legged beside her. “How are you, my lady? Is it too hard for you living in these…” he looked at his mother,”… rough circumstances?”

She laughed. “With what is going on around us? Did you know that the Erilonian shrine just one street over was blown into firewood by a cannonball? I am fortunate to have a place to live and people to help me.” She smiled teasingly. “Your mother has been very kind.”

“Oh, I have been filling Lady Elan’s head with the wonders of the temple and the stories of the gods’ kindness. She is all but signed and dismembered to become a Trigonate Sister.”

“Signed and delivered,” he said offhandedly. “I see now that I am not the only one suffering. You do not have to listen to her, Elan. She is used to her speeches being ignored.”

This time, the young woman’s smile was calmer, more genuine. “No. I like to hear of it. I think I might indeed find some peace, someday, in holy orders…” She saw the stricken look on Tinwright’s face and misunderstood it. “No, truly, I do not say it simply to please your mother.”

Anamesiya Tinwright nodded happily. “Lady Elan knows that the gods punish wickedness, and that the only way to avoid punishment is to do what the gods wish.…”

“But you have told us nothing of what brings you,” Elan said, cutting across his mother’s preamble. “Tell us your news, Matthias.”

“Ah!” He sat up. “You have reminded me—I brought you something.” He dug into the pocket of his doublet, where he had been carrying it next to his heart. “Here. It is a book of prayer with images of the life of Zoria.” He handed it to her. “It once belonged to Princess Briony. I found it in the chapel.”

Elan looked at it carefully, but she seemed less than ecstatic with the gift. “It is very beautiful, Matthias. Look at the paintings! Such skill!” She turned the pages slowly, then handed it back. “But I cannot accept such a gift. It belongs to the princess and if she comes back, she will want this lovely thing again.”

He was surprised and confused. “But… surely she would not begrudge it to someone who… who has suffered as you have suffered…”

“No, thank you. It is a kind thought and a lovely thing, but I can’t accept it.” She would not quite meet his eyes. “It belongs to someone else.”

“But what am I to do with it?”

She shook her head. “I do not know, Matthias.”

He was so disappointed that for a moment he considered leaving it there and walking out, but his mother was watching him with such a poorly-hidden expression of satisfaction that he changed his mind and put it back in his breast pocket again. “I will think of something, then. Perhaps I’ll offer it at the Zorian shrine.”

“Have you any other news to share?” Elan asked. He had the distinct feeling now that his presence was being endured rather than enjoyed.

“Nothing much,” he said, and stood. “In fact, I am on an errand to the Erivor Chapel for Hendon Tolly even now and should be on my way. Things at the residence are… well, they are bad, to speak truthfully. Tolly is full of strange notions and doesn’t seem to have any desire to withstand the autarch’s siege—he can hardly be bothered to speak to Berkan Hood or Avin Brone.…”

“Our poor lord protector has forgotten that the gods do not give any of us burdens too great to bear,” Tinwright’s mother said piously. “He will recover his faith. He is a good man.”

Even the newly religious Elan couldn’t quite go along with this. “We must pray for Lord Hood and Lord Brone, Anamesiya. They will need the gods’ help, too.”

Anamesiya! She was even calling his mother by her first name! What next?

He had never thought he would make up excuses to leave the company of Elan M’Cory, but now he found himself doing exactly that.

Alone among the thousands of people crowded into Southmarch Castle, Father Uwin did not seem to realize that a war was going on, let alone that its result might be the end of the world.

“Yes, yes, of course, with pleasure—we get so few visitors these days!” the spritely old man said as he led Tinwright into the chapel’s library, which was in the King’s South Cabinet, a room for prayer and meditation that doubled as the chaplain’s office. It had been less than a year since he had replaced Father Timoid, who had been the Eddon family priest for years. “What does Lord Tolly want? What can we do for him?”

Tinwright tried to tell Father Uwin what he had learned to this point, a confusing jumble of happenstances, rumors, and strange ideas. He had spent all of the past two days (traveling only in daylight, of course) in the great Trigonate Temple in the outer keep to study the books there. “I was trying to find out why some of the Hypnologues thought Southmarch was such a significant place, you see.”

“Hypnologues?” The priest cocked his small head. With his tuft of white hair waving atop his head he looked like a startled chicken. “That heretic sect from the old days? The ones who thought the gods were asleep? Why should Lord Tolly care about them?”

Tinwright wanted to end this particular discussion before it ever began. “That is for him to say, Father. It is only for me to do his bidding.”

“Of course, of course.” Uwin rubbed dust from his eyeglass lenses, which hung on a scissor-shaped holder around his neck, then lifted them to his squinting eyes. “Here is Clemon—he wrote on them, I think, although only briefly. But you must have seen that already in the great temple library.”

“Yes, I have. I came here because there was a rumor mentioned about a sacred stone that the Hypnologues believed came from the gods themselves, and on which they based much of their beliefs. Rhantys thought that the stone was lost somewhere below the earth here in Southmarch. But another book said that very stone was displayed here during King Kyril’s reign—right here in the Erivor Chapel! Do you know anything about that, Father?”

“A stone sacred to heretics, here in the chapel?” He shuddered and ostentatiously made the sign of the Three. “I find it hard to believe—I have certainly never heard of any such thing. Perhaps you could find Father Timoid and ask him. I’ve heard he’s living at the university on the far side of the bay.…”

Uwin obviously wasn’t considering the difficulties of visiting East-march on the other side of the autarch’s besieging forces, even if the university hadn’t already been burned down by one of the occupying armies. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Father. But I would like to look through the books here if I could. Especially if there are records kept by your predecessors.”

Uwin gave him a skeptical look. “The bond between the Erivor chaplains and the royal family is not for outsiders to scrutinize, and their conversations are not meant…”

Tinwright held up his hand. “I’m only interested in the daybook, or whatever it would be called here. Records, purchases, things like that.”

The little priest led him down to a row of heavy, leather-bound volumes. “These are the charter books for Kyril’s reign. Good luck with your search.”

When Uwin had left him alone, Matt Tinwright pulled a stack of thick books from the shelf and sat down on the floor. He had not told Uwin everything, and one of the most significant facts he had left out was the strange thing he had read about how the statue came to be in the chapel. Kyril, the king, had taken the stone from the Funderlings as part of some dispute and then had dedicated it to Erivor. But why? And why did the Hypnologues and other believers think it was something to do with the gods in the first place?

Most importantly, though, could this statue truly be the Godstone that Hendon Tolly and the autarch were looking for? The thought made Tinwright’s skin go cold. Could he truly have found the key to the war that raged all around?

Father Uwin came back about an hour later. “And how do you, Master Tinwright? Any fortune?”

“I think so, Father. See here.” He pointed at a passage in the charter book and read aloud. “ ’Given to the chapel, by His Majesty, King Kyril, a statue of a god made from some unknown stone or gem, taken from an altar of the Funderlings beneath the castle, dedicated by the king to great Erivor…’ So you see, that might be it. But I could find no other mention of it…”

“We have no such thing in the chapel now,” Uwin said with certainty. “I would have seen it.”

“You didn’t let me finish, Father. I found no other mention of it for fifty years, until Father Timoid spoke of it in his own charter book—here, a bit less than ten years ago: ‘The statue of Kernios given to the chapel by Kyril has been stolen. I have informed King Olin and begun a search through the castle. I suspect a servant.’ Later he mentions that several servants were questioned and some were beaten, but no sign of it was ever found.”

“Beat the wrong servants, perhaps,” Uwin said cheerfully. “Might not have needed to, anyway. Surely you know the famous tale of the thief who stole a gold chalice from one of Perin’s shrines and it began to burn in his pocket as though it was molten…”

“Well, if it burned somebody up, this... ‘statue of Kernios,’ it is not recorded. But the real question is, where did it go?”

“Ten years past?” Uwin shook his head. “Somebody took the statue ten years ago, with people going in and out of the castle by the hundreds every day, and scores of ships coming and going… ? It is lost, young man, whatever it was. Comfort yourself and the lord protector that it could not have been worth much, to be so little discussed even after it was stolen.”

“I do not think that will bring much comfort to Hendon Tolly,” Tinwright said as he bade the priest farewell. “But I will tell him.”

As he made his way back, Tinwright wondered precisely what news he could give to the lord protector. There had been a statue, but it had disappeared years ago. Not the kind of news that Hendon Tolly would enjoy.

It was only as four men stepped out of the shadows below the Lagoon Bridge that the idea came to him.

“Please, fellows, I’m in a hurry,” he said. “I have no money…”

“You look like you might be worth something, though,” said the leader, a fellow with only one eye but very broad shoulders and an equally broad gut. “At the very least, we’ll have those fine clothes off you, my lord.”

Tinwright certainly had a few things they would like, like the prayer book he had tried to give Elan, but as the other three moved in behind their leader, Tinwright suddenly realized that these men might not stop at robbing him. But if they killed him, he’d never learn whether the Kernios statue really was Hendon’s Godstone!

He raised his hands. “Let me make something clear.” He reached slowly into his doublet and produced the letter of safe-conduct Tolly had given him. “I am on a personal mission for Lord Protector Hendon Tolly. If you think your lives are misery now, just slow me one long moment in my work for him and you’ll find out what true suffering is.”

One of the men looked at him, then turned to One-Eye. “He works for Tolly.”

“He says he does!” the leader said, but the others were already turning away.

“That’d be my balls in the lagoon and my head in after it,” said one. “Let’s go find somewhat else to bother.”

So it was that only a short time later Tinwright was back in his old room in the back of the residence, shaking Puzzle awake.

“Come on, old man, get up!” he called. “I need you to tell me what you remember about a statue of Kernios being stolen out of the Erivor Chapel.”

And despite his initial fear at being awakened so suddenly, and his subsequent pettishness, Puzzle told him everything he remembered.

“By the silent footfalls of Zoria herself,” Tinwright said when the old jester had finished, “this just gets madder and madder.” He got up, pacing as he tried to make sense of what Puzzle had suggested. “Is there no end to this mystery?” he finally groaned. “What should I do now?”

But the jester was already asleep again.

20. Words from the Burned Land

Briony found Prince Eneas in his tent, stripped to the waist as one of the troop barbers bandaged his wounds. “You’re hurt!” she cried. The skin of his flat belly was covered with cuts just beginning to bleed again after having been wiped clean.

He shook his head. “Nothing. I fell from my horse and was dragged a bit—these are scars made by my own mail.” Eneas had put aside his plate armor for the raid, preferring the lightness and flexibility of a coat of rings.

Briony knew that being unhorsed in the middle of a fight was no small thing, but she had also learned that Eneas preferred to make light of injuries. “And your soldiers?”

“We had a few spites but lost not a man—but I am even more relieved to see you, Briony. I almost dare not ask—did you find your father?”

She told him the story, or at least the bare bones, since many of the things that had passed between her and Olin were for the family’s ears alone. The prince listened carefully.

“It is splendid news that you found him, and that his spirit is still strong,” he said when she had finished. “Splendid—but I wonder at what he says about Midsummer. Does the autarch really believe in his superstitions so strongly that he would risk an attack when the siege itself would do his work in a matter of a few weeks or less?”

“My father heard it from the autarch himself. Everyone says this Sulepis is quite mad!”

Eneas frowned. “I suppose. But it gives us very little time. Have you rested?”

“I’m well, yes.” The scout had brought her back to camp just before sunrise, and Briony had promptly fallen directly into a dark, deep sleep, so that now the whole evening, especially speaking to her father, felt like a dream.

“But what will we do?” she asked. “We have so little time, and I saw the Xixian camp—they are so many! Close to ten thousand men camped on the mainland, more than half of them fighters. And from what I heard, many more have already gone into the tunnels. I think they plan to attack the castle from below, through Funderling Town.”

“Funderling… ?” He looked at her blankly for a moment, then nodded. “Ah, yes, the Kallikan settlement. I have heard of it—the fabled ceiling, is that right? Your father must be correct. There could be no other reason for the autarch to be in such haste—Hendon Tolly is barely fighting back at all and the autarch’s ships rule the bay. I would guess the castle might even surrender in a matter of days if the Xixians simply kept knocking down the walls with their cannons.”

Briony felt a flare of anger. “Tolly is a monster, but there are still men in Southmarch—and women, too!—who will not give in so easily.”

“I believe you, Princess.” Eneas smiled; it was approving, not mocking. “I have seen the stuff the country’s royal family is made of, so why would I doubt their subjects? Still, we cannot make any decisions until tomorrow at the earliest. That is when the first of the spies we have sent into the camp will begin to report back on the autarch’s full strength and perhaps even something of his plans.…”

“No!” She realized she had shouted: everyone in the tent was staring at her. “I mean… my father… I do not want to wait before we free him. I’ve thought of a way to do it, but if we wait longer they may take him somewhere beyond our reach!”

It took Briony a moment to realize that the prince was looking at her strangely, as was his lieutenant and several others. “You do not know?” he asked.

“Know what?” But already she had that vertiginous feeling, what had seemed solid crumbling away beneath her. “Tell me!”

Eneas sighed. “Your father has already been moved,” he said. “Some of our spies say that an armed party of more than a hundred men escorted a prisoner to the tunnels in the rocky hills along the bay.” He reached out a hand to her, but Briony pulled back. “I am sorry, Princess, but it was your father, King Olin. He is no longer within our reach—at least not for the present.”

The tears which she had held back ever since the night before suddenly filled her eyes; Briony knew she could not hold them in. She turned sharply and walked out of the tent, desperate to find a place where Eneas and the rest could not hear her when she began to weep in earnest.

“It will do no good to argue with her,” Saqri warned, but Barrick had grown weary of being told what to do and what to think by the Qar in all their manifestations. He followed the retreating forms of Yasammez and her small troop of bodyguards as they walked back through the passageways toward the cavern where they were camped.

The fearsome dark lady of the fairies had already disappeared into her tent when he arrived. The Elemental before the doorway did not want to let him in, but Barrick simply stood, ignoring the thing’s gestures and even the silent, resentful threats the thing offered him, thought to thought. The Fireflower suggested that he had standing among these folk and he was determined to use it. The flickering of the Elemental’s Profound Light through the gaps in the shrouding cloth grew brighter and more agitated, but Barrick Eddon was not going to let himself be treated like a servant. He might be a fool, he might be a mortal fool, but he had survived impossible hardships to be here—Yasammez would not escape him so easily.

At last the half-hidden fires guttered and diminished. The Elemental stepped aside, but not without a last flare of protest as Barrick walked past.

Yasammez was alone in the tent, without even her counselors or guards; Barrick couldn’t help wondering whether that meant she trusted him or simply counted him as no possible threat. The angry confidence that had sent him after her began to melt as soon as he saw her sitting cross-legged and as still as stone, her pale hands resting on her knees.

“And what do you want, little blood-jar?” Yasammez asked.

He had become so used to his new and strange ways of hearing and seeing that for a moment he could not tell if her words had been silent or spoken out loud, but after a moment he realized he could feel a tiny reverberation lingering in the close air of the tent. He decided that he would speak out loud as she had. Perhaps she thought she could anger him by speaking in air and echoes as if he were any mortal, but if she did, she did not know how Barrick Eddon had changed. “I wish to speak with you, Great-Aunt.”

“I am not your great-aunt. The blood that is in you gives you no rights with me, any more than pilfering a royal signet ring would make you fit to issue orders in the king’s name. That blood—our family’s sacred blood, gift of our patron god—was stolen.”

Now he truly was angry, but he held it in. “Don’t speak to me of signet rings and royalty, Lady Yasammez. My family may not be as old as yours—or at least our throne may not be—but I know a great deal about the rights of kings and queens. Those rights have a price, and part of that price is doing what is best for your people. Do you really think refusing to fight for Southmarch is what’s best for yours?”

She cocked her head like a heron watching a fish. “Ha! I am being lectured by a spring toadlet, newly hatched and still wet from the pond.” She showed her teeth, but it was not a smile. “I have told my people the truth. It is too late to win by force of arms. Better to accept what is written, to run and perhaps live a little longer or stay and accept that the final hour of the Long Defeat has come at last.”

“So you’re giving up?” He stared at her and the voices in his head murmured a thousand different things, a storm of confusion, secrets, old tales, half-forgotten histories, battlefield incidents, all with the black, shadowy form of Lady Porcupine standing at their center like a witch from a nursery tale. “No. I don’t believe that. You never surrender. Everyone knows you would fight for your people to the last drop of blood, so why should you counsel them to do what you would never do yourself ? What do I not understand, Lady Yasammez?”

This time the wolfish grin pulled her lips back so that she looked as though she might be thinking about the skin on his throat. “You are a very annoying mortal, Barrick Eddon. What makes you so certain of yourself? Look at you! You are a scarecrow, cobbled together from other people’s odds and remnants—the immortal blood of your betters runs in your veins, you have been bespelled by senile Dreamers and gifted with the Fireflower, though you cannot possibly understand it. Why should I even give you the courtesy of an audience? Why should anyone treat with you at all, a mere child who has taken everything that makes him exceptional from someone else?”

She was right, which made it even more important that Barrick not lose his temper. The question she asked was deceptive, because what lay behind it was true—there was no reason she should be speaking to him, should even bother to defend herself.

“Why, then?” he asked. “Why do you speak to me at all?” Barrick moved a step closer. Her strength was palpable. Within him the Fireflower sang of woe and defeat and courage. “You remind me of someone, Lady Yasammez.”

One thin spiderweb of eyebrow rose. “Do I? A mortal?”

“I have not known many immortals until the last few days.” Unbidden, he seated himself cross-legged before her. “Yes, a mortal. My teacher, Shaso dan-Heza. He was the greatest warrior of his people, I’m told, just as you are. But he lost his purpose.”

The predatory smile appeared again. “I have not lost my purpose.”

“So Shaso thought, too—but he had. You see, my father captured him and took him away from his own people. And although he taught us, and eventually became Southmarch’s master of arms, a part of him never left Tuan, never left Xand—never left the old days.”

“So you think I am trapped in the past? Is that your considered judgment, O wise princeling?”

“I think you are crippled just as he was—by distance. In Shaso, it was distance from Tuan, which was always more real to him than Southmarch, although he never went back. But with you I suspect it’s the distance between then and now—between a time that made sense for you and these strange modern days, when, to fight a greater evil, you must ally yourself with those you see as traitors and enemies… with mortals.”

“I do what is best for the People,” the dark lady said, but for the first time a little of her ease had gone. “You could carry the Fireflower for centuries and still not be worthy to judge me…”

“Then tell me—when Ynnir presented you with the Pact of the Glass, what did you say?” The Fireflower had already brought him the answer on wings of murmurous near-memory.

Yasammez cocked her head again. It was said that the Autarchs of Xis held the falcon as their token—well, here was a true hunting bird, bright-eyed and remorseless. “I told him that the People’s enemies must not be allowed to hasten the Long Defeat. That we no longer had a choice, and must fight or surrender.”

“But now you all but demand we surrender. Queen Saqri has returned! The autarch means to wake the gods—even you said this would be disaster for us all! Why won’t you fight, Yasammez?”

He could feel the misty tendrils of her thought pulling at him as she silently considered. “I will not fight because there is no longer a point,” she told him at last. “The end of the Long Defeat is here—I see that now. The People… my people,” and here she gave him a look so fierce he could almost feel his lashes smoldering, “have done all they could. With only a handful of troops we have defeated your armies of ten times that number. But the king of Xis has a hundred times that number or more, and priests and mages whose handiwork we have not even seen yet. There is no victory over such a force.”

“So you would leave the mortal men of Southmarch—not just my people, but the Funderlings, too—to fight and die while your army sits by and does nothing? That is how you would write the last pages of the Long Defeat? With cowardice and callousness?”

“Grace and cowardice are two different things, child of men.”

“Then let your people fight if they wish to! You can watch gracefully while the rest of us pretend we have a chance.” He was angry now, and the incomprehensible differences of age and experience between them suddenly seemed unimportant. “Saqri came here to fight at your side. I don’t believe she came here to watch others being slaughtered without lifting a finger.”

Yasammez looked different now, like a wounded creature that still might strike. For a long moment she did not look at Barrick at all, but he could feel her anger, cold and strong. When she did rise abruptly to her feet and reached into the chestplate of her armor, he even raised his hand, fearing a thrown dagger. Instead, she drew out something that dangled on a black chain, a light glinting red as molten iron, and held it out to him. Her thoughts were like a roiling thundercloud, but although he could feel her anger and despair, most of it was hidden from him. Something else lurked there, too, something deep and terrifying, but he could not tell what it was.

“Take the Seal of War,” she said. “Take it and give it to Saqri. Keep it yourself if you wish. I care not. If I am no longer fit to judge, then I am no longer fit to command.”

He stared at the dangling glow. “But…”

“Take it!”

He did, reaching toward her with as much caution as toward a poisonous serpent. She stared at him as he let the heavy gem rest on his hand, and he swore he saw hatred in her eyes, although he was not entirely certain why.

“Because I am a mortal?” he asked. “Because my family stole the Fireflower?”

She understood him. “All of it,” she said. “And more. Fight if you wish. It will only make the end harder. And what if the cosmos spins a-widdershins and you are victorious? The People are still doomed. The Fireflower will find no more bearers—the royal line of the Qar is dead and only Saqri remains. So go, little mortal, and tell the others how you taunted Lady Porcupine and lived. It will be a pretty tale to while away the hours before death takes us all.”

So fierce was the heat behind her words, so furious her stare that Barrick suddenly could not speak. He turned, the Seal of War dangling from his fist, and stumbled out of the tent.

Briony was not so foolish as to go far from the perimeter of the camp but she could not simply spend the day sitting, as Eneas and his Temple Dogs seemed perfectly content to do. Too much anger and too much frustration were inside her. She had to move.

She found a little hill overlooking the camp and in sight of the sentries, then set off to climb it. The day was gray, but patches of sunny sky slid by overhead, and the way up was just difficult enough to engage her mind. By the time she reached the top about midday, she felt better. Still, she dared not think about her father too much. To have been so close to him after all this time, and then to lose him again… !

Prince Eneas and his captains were planning swift, unexpected raids to harry Sulepis’ mainland troops, and to prevent supplies from reaching the autarch’s army. This last was largely pointless as long as the autarch still controlled Brenn’s Bay, but at the very least Eneas meant to make the autarch aware that he had enemies behind him as well as in front of him.

But although Briony didn’t really expect the Syannese prince and his troops to do anything else, she could not escape the bitter idea of her father being taken away into the depths. But why should he be taken down into the tunnels under the castle? What lunacy did the southern king have planned?

Her father had also told her that his old, bad feelings were coming back to him as he returned to the castle. Perhaps that had something to do with why the autarch had brought him here. And gods? Her father had said something about gods, too, and Midsummer’s Night, which was far less than a tennight away.

If only I had a longer time to talk with him. If only I could see him again, embrace him again… The tears were coming back.

Briony pulled out Lisiya’s charm and turned it over and over in her hand, trying to find some kind of peace. So many questions, and none of them likely to be answered soon, or at all. And meanwhile, the sun slid by overhead, in and out of the clouds, on its remorseless passage toward Midsummer’s Day.

Despite her climb, she lay awake for a long time that night listening to the soldiers talking and singing quietly and playing dice. The scouts the autarch had sent out to search for the raiders had long since returned to their encampment along Brenn’s Bay, so the men were enjoying the relative security.

Briony was still clutching the charm in her fist. Please, dear Lisiya, she prayed, help me to sleep. I feel like I will go mad if I do not get to sleep tonight! But when sleep came at last in the deep watches of the night, Briony did not immediately recognize it for what it was....

She was walking through what had once been a forest, something deep and green and quiet—but that had been before the fire. Now it was a scorched wasteland, pocked with the blackened remains of trees both standing and fallen, the grasses and undergrowth burned away, even the earth itself blackened. It was hard to tell what time of day it was because of the pall of smoke that lay over her and made the gray, hot sky seem shallow as a bowl. Smaller wisps still rose from the ground, as though the flames had stopped burning only a short while before.

It was as she crunched through the burned stubble that she realized she was still holding Lisiya’s charm tight against her breast.

Briony found the demigoddess at the base of what had been a great silver oak tree, but was now little more than a tortured sculpture made of charcoal. Lisiya was leaning on a staff, frail and gray as a dandelion puff. She looked half her previous size, as though the hot winds had leached all the moisture from her, leaving only skin and bones.

“Somebody is angry at me,” she said with a weary grin.

“Who did this?” Briony asked. The demigoddess looked so delicate that she almost didn’t dare approach her.

“I cannot say. I am being watched.” Lisiya lifted a clawlike hand. “The sky itself listens.”

“Is this because of me?” Briony asked, sinking to her knees on the scorched earth. “Because you helped me?”

“Possibly.” Lisiya shrugged. The demigoddess had previously seemed inexhaustible, but now moved as though she was afraid any effort might snap her brittle bones. “It does not do to speculate, child. The gods are asleep and that makes it hard to understand them, or even to recognize them…”

Briony didn’t understand. “Is there something I can do to help you?”

The specter of a smile crept across the gaunt, wrinkled face. “Listen. I will tell you what I can. I am… limited, though.” She sagged a little, then pulled herself upright on her staff again. “The hour is coming. It is almost here. The hour when the world we know will end.”

“But… do you mean it’s too late?”

“It is too late to turn things back to the way they once were,” Lisiya said. “It is too late for the world that was. What kind of world will come—that you may yet be able to influence.”

“Influence? How?”

“That is not for me to say. But you have only a little time.”

“Do you mean Midsummer Night? My father said…”

“Men call it Midsummer, but here in the place of the gods and their dreams, it marks the moment when the sun begins to die. And every year since time itself began, since Rud the Daystar first mounted the firmament, the battle rages. Mortal men celebrate Midsummer as if it is a victory, but it has always been the opposite—the moment when the sun, when light itself, begins to lose its battle. It is an ill-omened day.” She shook her head.

“But what can we do? It’s almost upon us!”

Now the frustration showed on Lisiya’s bony face. “I do not know! I am only a small thing, when it comes to it—a servant, an errandrunner—and I am out of my depths. But I called to you, or you called to me, so there must be something I can give you, some word…” The old woman closed her eyes, making Briony wonder what was happening: Lisiya seemed so tired she could barely breathe, swaying in place like a long stalk of grass. At last, she opened her eyes.

“Omphalos,” the demigoddess said faintly. “Look for the omphalos, that which connects the past to the womb and the womb to the future—that which is the center of the spinning universe.”

“What does that mean?”

Lisiya waved her clawlike hand. “I have told you what I can!” she said angrily. “Even now my words have attracted attention.”

“But I don’t understand… !”

“You must, because there is nothing else I can…” She broke off suddenly as red light flickered across the sky, flaring like blood against the gray smoke. “Go,” Lisiya said. “There is nothing more I can do. Farewell, Briony Eddon. If you survive, build me a shrine!”

Briony tried to ask her another question, but thunder was rattling the burned trees and making the parched ground shudder, and the harsh red light seemed to be growing by the moment.

Fire, Briony realized. The fire is coming back… !

And then the sky exploded with bloody, glaring scarlet, so bright and hot that Briony screamed in terror and woke up panting in her tent in the Syannese camp, her fist pressed hard against her breast. When she opened her hand, she saw the charm was blackened and shriveled as if it had been burned.

Barrick did not speak a word as he walked to Saqri’s tent. Hundreds of eyes watched him crossing the great chamber, and all of them must have seen the blood-red stone dangling from his hand. Others, more familiar with mortals, might have recognized the expression of surprise and growing wonder on his face.

She gave it to me, he marveled. I told the oldest, strongest woman in the world that she was wrong, and so she resigned the leadership of the Qar armies.

But was it really as simple and straightforward as that? Something about the exchange still troubled him, although at the moment he was too stunned to ponder it much.

The guards did not lift a hand to stop him as he walked past them into Saqri’s tent. She looked up from a silent conversation with two fairy creatures he did not recognize. Her eyes widened a fraction when she saw what dangled from his hand.

“I felt her, but I did not know what I was feeling,” was all she said. “Is that for me or for you?”

Barrick laughed. It had not even occurred to him that he might keep it himself. He did not understand enough—he might never understand enough. “For you. And then you must decide what your people are going to do.”

“We will fight, of course,” she said, reaching out with slim fingers and letting the gem nestle in her hand. “Crooked was my grandfather’s longest grandfather, as we say—the father of the Fireflower. We cannot let him be used by this mad king. If the Long Defeat finally claims our kind, most of us will embrace it, for who would want to live in a world without the beauty of accident?” She stood looking down at the gem for a moment, then carefully lifted the chain over her dark hair and let the Seal of War rest on her white breastplate.

“Call them all from their camps—water children, air children, and all of the People who follow the Seal of War. Tell them we are making last choices now. The end of the Godwar has come.”

And so the Qar and their ancient allies, Rooftoppers and Skimmers, came from all the places they had been waiting and met in a great cavern near the Funderling temple, a wide, low-roofed chamber filled with limestone columns. Saqri sat beside a small, shallow pool in the middle of the cavern and all the others ranged themselves around it like the knights of Lander’s famous court, except instead of a table they gathered around a liquid mirror which reflected the lights of their torches and lanterns. Upsteeplebat’s people stood in their miniature lines near Saqri, with headman Turley and his Skimmers beside them. The leaders of the Qar seated themselves around the rest of the pond, their peoples crowded in behind them. Even the chief eremite Aesi’uah, the woman with the dark eyes, was there. Only Yasammez herself was absent. It was strange for Barrick to think of Lady Porcupine wandering alone and bitter somewhere beneath his old home, but he thought he understood her. She was not the type to surrender, but she had done so. She would not want to watch decisions being made without her.

“Once we were one people!” Saqri’s voice sounded as hard and sweet as the ring of a stone temple bell. “Once we were one song. Now we are dozens of different melodies, but today we join together to bring our songs into harmony once more. The Children of Black Earth—the Funderlings, as they are named here—have gone before us to fight the enemy, but to us they are drows and they have always been family, however estranged. The Skimmers are here with us. We call them Ocean’s Children, and although some have tried to make them follow this leader or that over the centuries, like the ocean they have remained free. We are proud they return to fight alongside us.

“And Thunder’s Children, who are the smallest of all, except in courage. Their kindred, the Tine Fay, live on in the shadowlands, some in the wilds, some in the towns and cities. Perhaps one day you will be reunited with them. Perhaps not. Nothing is easy to see or understand this close to the collapse of things.

“And we will fight beside humans, too, those we once called ‘stone apes’ before we learned to respect their strength and fear their intolerance. I would not be alive today without them. Barrick Eddon, the heir to this castle’s throne, brought me back the essence of my life, and he also stands with us in this fight. If there was any doubt about the days we live in they will be answered when I tell you that the Fireflower now blooms in his veins. Yes, think on that—the king my husband is dead, but his essence, and that of all his predecessors, is alive in the blood of a mortal man.”

A flock of whispers came from the gathered Qar, and many turned to stare at Barrick, eyes of almost every imaginable shape and size widening as they gazed at him.

“Mortal men also fight along with the Funderlings below us,” Saqri continued, “and thousands more have fought and died in the castle above, protecting the god who saved us all, though they did not know what they did or what it meant. Nevertheless, all debts will be paid by this last battle,” Saqri declared. “Whether we succeed or fail, live or die, our invasion of mortal lands is over.”

Somewhere Lady Yasammez heard that, and the clutch of anger and sorrow that came back, the feeling of being forced into dishonor, was so strong in his thoughts that Barrick almost fell over.

“Now we must plan,” Saqri said. “The ritual this autarch wants to perform in the Last Hour of the Ancestor must take place at Midsummer, and that is only days away. If we can somehow help the Funderlings to hold him back, he will miss his opportunity, and then have to hold his gains for a year before he can try again. Anything might happen in that time. Make no mistake—his army is vast and fierce, and he will sacrifice them to the last man if necessary to reach his goal, because once he has the powers of Heaven at his command he will no longer need an army. He will be unvanquishable.”

Only days, Barrick thought, looking around the cavern. Even counting those who were invisible in the shadows, they had only a few hundred fighters and not much more than a thousand Qar all together. Aesi’uah had told them that the Funderlings numbered perhaps two thousand, but likely much fewer.

“We will make our numbers felt,” said Saqri as if she had heard his thoughts. “But not down here—not at first. To make ourselves feared by the men in the earth, we must first strike in the open air. The southerners are used to seeing their own soldiers disappear into the tunnels. They will not be prepared for what comes out of them.”

“What do you mean, Mistress?” asked old Turley, his hairless face wrinkled in puzzlement. “The Xixies are digging down into the earth like worms.”

“Yes,” said Saqri. “But more than half their soldiers, their supplies, and ships remain on the surface. So we are not going down—we are going up.”

Barrick thought the idea was bizarre. Surely they did not have time to waste fighting on the beaches of Brenn’s Bay! And what hope did they have in any case—a few hundred fairies, fishermen, and creatures no bigger than mice? Either the Xixians’ cold steel or the coming of Midsummer would destroy them all. He felt cold and withdrawn at the thought. Saqri’s plan seemed nonsense.

And you will see it all, a voice sighed inside him, rising up from his thoughts like a single wisp of smoke. You will see many die.

Ynnir? Lord, is that you?

Yes, but you will lose me again. This I can see… The voice barely whispered in his thoughts, like a priest relating an old tale of outrage, one whose purpose had long since become obscure. I fear you are to lose everything, manchild. Everything…

By the time he returned to his tent in the Qar camp, Barrick found someone had laid out a suit of fine Qar armor for him made of a type of pearly gray plate he had never seen before, as well as a high helm with a crest in the shape of laurel leaves. The armor was not new—it had many tiny scratches that had not been entirely polished away—and he could tell by the buzzing in his head that the Fireflower voices recognized it. Still, at the moment Ynnir or some other agency was keeping the Fireflower thoughts from Barrick himself, so the only memories it awakened in him were distant and unclear.

The armor was beautifully made and he knew he would need it, but something about the gift remained hidden from his understanding and that troubled him.

21. Call of the Cuttlehorn

“When they come against you,” his sergeant Donal Murroy had told him, “you’ll think at first they’re endless and all the same, like waves breaking against the causeway. Don’t let that fool you.”

It had been one of Ferras Vansen’s first nights alone on sentry duty with the old soldier. He could still remember every word.

“Did you really fight them?”

Murroy had spit over the edge of the wall, then ducked back when the wind changed. “The Xixies? Aye, lad. Two years fighting for King Olin when he was a young man—and I was, too! Siege of Hierosol. That old bastard, Parak. He was autarch then. Parnad’s his son.”

Now it was Parnad’s son, Sulepis, that Vansen in turn had to face. The names changed, but the aggression of the Xixian army seemed to go on and on.

“What do you mean, don’t let that fool you?” the young Vansen had asked.

“They’re not all the same. Our armies here in the north, we pull them together when we need them. We’re lucky if we can run a few kerns with spears out first to trouble the other side’s horses. The autarch keeps a hundred thousand men under arms at all times. He has to, to keep down all those Xandian countries he’s conquered. Biggest army since the great days of Hierosol itself, and each soldier has a different place in it. By the balls of Volios, boy, did you know there’s an entire company that does nothing but feed and water the autarch’s elephants?”

Vansen had never even seen an elephant. “Truly?”

“Truly. Pray you never have to come up against those beasts, lad. Big as a house and they can take arrows like a miner’s mouse. I’ve seen them pluck up a grown man and throw him a hundred feet through the air, like Bram Stoneboots in the old stories. They are demons to fight.” Murroy had paused to spit again. “Here was how the autarch’s army came at us at Hierosol.” Unlike most soldiers, old Murroy had believed in knowing his enemies well, something he had done his best to teach Vansen. “First were the Naked, as they’re called—infantry, armed with spears and shields. Most of them are from the subject countries, Sania, Zan-Kartuum, Tuan, Iyar, but their officers are all Xixies. They come like the waves on Brenn’s Bay—the autarch will throw them at the enemy for hour upon hour. Behind them were the Hakka Slingers, the gunners, and the Great Thunder, his cavalry—desert riders on horses fast as the wind. When they charge, all you can do is wait and trust your spears and your shield-wall.

“And of course,” the sergeant had continued, spitting over the side once more as if to rid himself of the memory of waiting for the Great Thunder to strike, “the gods-cursed autarch has his special troops as well, his White Hounds, who are captured Trigonates from the north, and his Leopards, his personal riflemen and bodyguards. Each trained Leopard guard, they say, is worth a full rank of lesser soldiers.”

“If the autarch’s army is so vast and so powerful, then how did Olin defeat him?”

“He didn’t, not truly,” Murroy had admitted. “The siege failed, but only because the walls of Hierosol are so strong. If the day comes when Hierosol falls to Xis—well, I hope I am not alive to see what happens to the rest of Eion.”

“They’re bringing back the fire!” bellowed Sledge Jasper as he pushed against Vansen’s belly, tumbling him backward. The cry was still echoing past the rest of the Funderling defenders as the advance guard tried to squeeze themselves back into the tunnel at the same time as the men with the fire shields were trying to push forward. “Hurry!” Jasper screeched.

The shield-troop got there only moments before the Xixian artillery dragged their fire-cannons into place, weird, octopuslike arrangements of bellows and plastered barrels and flexible piping that more closely resembled the instruments played by Settland hillmen than weapons of war. Still, it was only the swift erection of the Funderling fire wall, each re-curved shield nearly twice a Funderling’s height and covered with a fiber they called “rock wool,” that saved the lives of those behind them because the passage into which they had fallen back was too narrow to allow a swift retreat. The liquid Xixian fire, ignited as it leaped from the gunlike pipes, washed over the shields. Some drops got through and splattered on the troops cowering behind the shield bearers, causing men to scream in terrible pain; even several rows back from the front, the heat made Vansen’s hair and eyelashes crackle.

“Crossbows!” Vansen would have given everything he owned for a single company of Kertish longbowmen, but no one had given him one, so he was making do with the dozen or so old crossbows the warders had owned since King Ustin’s time. Still, he had to admit the warders had acquitted themselves well.

As the first casks of Xixian fire emptied and the flames reached their greatest strength then began to fall off, Vansen hurried his crossbowmen down the crowded passage and had them stand behind the protective shields. As the Xixians rushed to replace the spent casks with full ones the Funderling shield bearers lowered their great curved shields and crouched so that the archers could fire over their shoulders. Screams and a great gout of fire from a burst bladder on one of the fire-cannons gave Vansen the courage to call for a charge.

The Funderlings poured out of the narrow passage and into the cavern like rats out of a hole, their axes and hammers swinging as they shouted, “The Guild!” and “Earth Elders!” They fell on the dozen Xixian fire-makers and their guards in a moment and curses and shouts and the ring of steel on steel filled the small chamber. But the rest of the Xixians, hundreds of well-armed infantry—“the Naked”—surged forward.

“Grab that fire-cannon and fall back!” Vansen shouted.

As his men stumbled back into the passageway he made them drop the cannon in a heap of bent and scorched parts at the place where the passage opened to the main chamber. He found the matchlock and trigger for the fire-cannon and spiked the end of the smoldering match on a stray cross-bow bolt. He grabbed a bow from one of his retreating archers and then scrambled with them back up the passageway. When Vansen saw the Xixian infantry beginning to shove their way into the passage, he took careful aim and put the sparking match into one of the fire-cannon’s larger bladders.

The gust of hot wind and flame and the terrible screams of the Xixians drew cheers from the retreating Funderlings.

“Back to Pilgrim’s Reach,” Vansen called. “They won’t soon get past the Midsummer bonfire we’ve made for them here!”

“We haven’t even dug in,” said Jasper. “They struck so quickly they must have known we were here. But we should be able to hold them here for a long time.”

“We can’t afford to,” said Vansen. He pointed to the uppermost of Chert’s maps. “Look. If we choke off Pilgrim’s Reach here, then they will just go around us. They’ll likely find their way down by one of the spur tunnels. See, this laborer’s passage doesn’t even have a name, but it’s certainly wide enough for the Xixians to use.”

“Chert’s maps are more useful than I had thought,” said Cinnabar, breathing heavily as his son helped him take off his helmet. “I did not know there were so many unknown passages.”

“He studied the library in the temple, but he has also been down here himself, remember?” Vansen shuffled through the pile until he found the map of the level below them. “All the way to the island in the Sea in the Depths.”

Sledge Jasper, who had all but appointed himself Vansen’s personal bodyguard, let out a low whistle. “That Blue Quartz fellow was on the island? With the Shining Man himself?” He shook his head. “Never would have thought it of him.”

“Don’t underestimate him,” said Cinnabar, drinking water from a moleskin bag. “Chert is a rare and clever fellow. I hear more good sense spoken at his and his wife’s table than I do in the Highwardens’ chambers, and I don’t care who hears me say it.”

“But where is he?” asked Sledge. “I thought he stayed back in the temple with the priests and the others who can’t fight… or won’t fight.” His face told what he thought about those who would not take up weapons for Funderling Town.

“Don’t underestimate our allies, either, friend Jasper.” Vansen told him. “We have an entire platoon of monks standing bravely with us even though they have little training for it. By the gods, man, most of them have no better weapon than hoes and hammers and walking sticks!”

“Sorry, Captain. I meant no insult. I just wondered why he wasn’t here.”

“I know, Jasper. Chert Blue Quartz has a plan—an idea of his own, a big and desperate one—and we’ve told him to make what he can of it. It won’t help us, but if we fail it might at least help to save the rest of Funderling Town.”

“What’s he doing, Captain?”

Vansen shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t speak any more about it. The Guild seal is on it—is that spoken aright, Cinnabar?”

The magister nodded and sighed. “That’s it, exactly. It’s Guild business now, mad as it is.”

“You sound as though you think it will fail,” said Jasper.

“I do.” Cinnabar, with his young son Calomel’s help, lowered his armored back end onto a rock. “But I agreed to it, promised I would help, and I’ve done so. Now enough of this. We can do nothing more to help Chert, so let us think about what we can do here.”

Vansen pulled the map around. “As everyone knows, we’ll give ground as slowly as we can manage, but we will have to give ground. From the Counting Room and on down the tunnels. We’ll hold them for a long time in the Cavern of Winds, I hope, but our real stand will be in the Maze, I think. We’ll make then earn every inch there.”

“But they have their own miners, not to mention those weird little creatures covered in tortoiseshell.” Malachite Copper had joined them after seeing to his men. “Surely the southerners can find other ways around us?”

“Eventually, no doubt,” Vansen agreed. “But whenever they seem frustrated, we’re going to give a little. We’ll keep sentries in the other tunnels, so we’ll know if they find any of those routes. But if we fight as hard as we can and seem to give back only when we have to, then the autarch will keep his patience, and we’ll draw him downward as nicely as can be.”

“But that way we’ll lead him right into the Mysteries!” protested Sledge Jasper.

“We can’t beat them, Sledge. I know it sounds mad, but the fairies swear that what the autarch wants is to be there on the night of Midsummer’s Day to perform some black magic. That’s what we have to stop.”

“Well, you’re right, Captain.” Sledge Jasper nodded. “It does sound mad. But you’ve led us right so far, even in the beginning when I thought you’d have us all killed. Me and my men will do what you say.”

Vansen smiled. “We couldn’t manage it without you.” He turned to the others present, Cinnabar and Copper and the other Funderlings, some of them hereditary leaders of their own troops, some selected from the ranks of the warders by Vansen and Jasper. “This is a fight to the death… but it is also a dance. We must learn our partners’ movements and mood as well as we know our own.”

Jasper’s confidence disappeared in an instant. “A… dance? My men don’t dance, Captain.”

“Then think of it as a story being performed. Do you Funderlings have plays and players?”

Cinnabar frowned. “Of a sort. Some of the Metamorphic Brothers who conduct special rituals…” he hesitated for a moment,”… in the Mysteries, they are players of a sort.”

“Well and good,” said Vansen. “Think of it that way, then. It is up to us to put on a good show of resistance, but the only way we can do that is to fight and perhaps lose. And then, even if we manage to hold off a much greater force, when they begin to tire, we must give ground, however weary we are ourselves, and however good the position we must abandon.” Ferras Vansen spread his hands to show that he had nothing else to give. “That is our task, gentlemen. Perhaps the most difficult thing fighting men could be asked to do, and we must work this miracle with untrained troops and many new commanders. Could the odds be longer?” He turned to Jasper. “So don’t fear, friend Sledge. We may die in obscurity but there are many worse ways to do it—and many worse reasons.”

“It will be an honor to break my spade in obscurity with you, Captain.” Jasper sounded as though he was ready to run out and throw himself on a Xixian spear this very moment.

“Just the same,” Vansen said, “it is an honor I would have been happy to turn down.”

Pinimmon Vash was terrified by how much stone now lay above his head, of how far beneath the sky—and even beneath the sea!—he had come. It was all that he could do not to leap out of his litter this moment and force his way back past the soldiers in their strung-out camps until he had fought his way back to the surface. It wasn’t the knowledge of the permanent and fatal humiliation that would bring that kept him in place. Even the idea of losing face wasn’t enough to overcome the horror of these miles of stone weighing down upon his thoughts and feelings. Instead it was the face of the autarch himself, staring at him across the smoke of the ceremonial brazier, that kept Vash seated and smiling vapidly when he felt as though any moment his skin might yank itself free from his bones and run away without him.

Sulepis could go nowhere without the brazier, because it represented the fire of his godly ancestor, Nushash. It was the kind of thing Vash himself approved of: ancient, orderly, ceremonial, respectable—and exactly the sort of things his young master was emphatically not.

“Your face seems sour to me, Paramount Minister,” said Sulepis. “Has your keen eye spotted some weak spot in our assault?”

He hated it when the autarch made light of him in front of the soldiers, but even the polemarchs knew better than to show too much amusement. Whatever they might think of him in private, they all knew that Pinimmon Vash’s reach was second only to the Golden One’s. More officers than were gathered here today had incurred the paramount minister’s ire, and all of them were gone now, the luckiest in ignoble retirement.

Vash did his best to smile. “Sour, Golden One? How could anyone be sour in the midst of such a splendid adventure? I but reflected on worries of my own.”

“Ah, did you? How selfish you are, old man. All those concerns and you would not share a single one?” Sulepis turned to his prisoner. “Come, Olin, wouldn’t you like to hear what is worrying my good servant?”

To Vash’s eyes the northern king looked even paler than usual. His brow was damp, as if a fever were coming upon him. “I beg pardon,” Olin said. “I did not hear.”

“Never mind. Tell us why you are worried, Minster Vash.”

Vash took a breath, held it a moment. “I worry about you, O Golden One, that is all. I fear for your safety so far below the ground, in such a dark and treacherous place, and with such uncanny enemies.”

“But you told me only yesterday that I would triumph against any odds—that Heaven had ordained my victory, so how can you doubt me today? Do you doubt me, Minister?” The autarch was smiling, but the yellow lights of his eyes seemed as deep as the vast fires in the temple of Nushash.

He’s angry about something, Vash suddenly realized. Not me, but I was fool enough to let him notice an expression on my face. “I am sorry, Golden One. I try never to doubt your victory, but your enemies are so treacherous, so wicked… !”

Olin turned with a look of clammy disbelief on his face. “What? My poor people, wicked? Is it not enough to kill innocents without slandering them, too?”

“He does not mean them, Olin,” said the autarch, his mobile face suddenly full of noble feeling. “Although nobody who allows that Tolly creature to rule them can be truly innocent. Old Vash refers to my real enemies—the gods. And, yes, they are strong and cruel, but they do not have what I have… the blood of humanity flowing in my veins!”

The northern king, who unlike Vash himself seemed to have no reason to fear aggravating the autarch, asked, “What do you mean, humanity? It’s the blood of gods you’re always talking about—the blood that supposedly runs in my veins.”

Sulepis smiled with pleasure. “Ah, but that is just the point. The blood of the gods has grown thin and tired, but it is still the key that will unlock the door I need to open… and when the door is open, power will come through it. That power—the might of Heaven itself—will be mine. But my blood may be entirely mortal, or if Nushash is indeed my ancestor, it may have become an even thinner soup over the years than your own. What’s important about me is that I have the blood of human conquerors running in my veins—hard, silent men of the desert who seized what they wanted and held it by wits and bravery and nothing more. Who else would even think to snatch Heaven’s power? I am the closest thing this world has to a god, and it is exactly because of my mortal ancestors that the circle will be closed and I will inherit the greatest power imaginable.”

Olin looked at him for a long time. “Every time I think I have plumbed the uttermost depths of your madness, Sulepis, you surprise me yet again.”

“Excellent news!” The autarch was pleased. “Now come with me while I inspect the troops, Olin. They do not like this sunless place, and who can blame them? But I am their sun and I must shine upon them a little.”

“But I don’t shine,” Olin said quietly. “I only burn.”

“Ah.” Sulepis peered at him. “That is right, my friend, you suffer as you grow closer to your old home, do you not? Bad dreams, a racing heart, a pounding head? What an irony is there!” The autarch shook his head in dignified disapproval, like a grandfather watching the carryings-on of disrespectful youth. Vash could not help wondering how his master had managed to become even stranger than usual: Sulepis seemed to be trying on different ways of being, as though character could be changed like a priest’s ritual mask. “Is your suffering great?”

The look Olin gave him should have immediately set the young autarch aflame. “I persist. I survive.”

“Which is, after all, the highest to which most mortals can aspire, is it not?” The autarch laughed and stood. Half a dozen body servants rushed forward to unroll the sacred blue Bishakh carpet in whatever direction he chose to walk: Sulepis was still under the stricture of the priests not to touch the ground. Vash thought it strange that a man who was willing to kill kings and rob the gods themselves should be so scrupulous about religious ritual. “Now come along,” the autarch told his captive. “You will keep me company while I bring the sun’s brightness to my languishing soldiers.”

As his guards helped the northerner to his feet, Olin stumbled and took a lurching step toward Vash, then caught at the older man’s robes to keep from falling—or so it seemed; but as his sudden grab bent the paramount minister almost double, Olin leaned close to Vash’s ear.

“I know you are no fool,” the king whispered quickly. “If you wish to survive, go to Prusus. You will find him a good listener.”

For a moment Vash thought his own command of Eion’s common tongue had failed him—that Olin had muttered a curse and he had misheard it in a ludicrous, impossible way. But the quick look of significance the northerner gave him before allowing himself to be led away made the old minister’s heart, already beating swiftly, begin to rattle like a festival noisemaker.

Is he mad? Does he think for a moment I would betray the autarch?

But a second, guiltier thought followed quickly. What did he see in me? Is it in my face? Can everyone see my doubts?

A moment later came the third and most horrifying idea of all: Olin must have heard something. He’s telling me that the Golden One already plans to have me removed and executed. Sulepis only toys with me, like a cat with a granary rat.

Vash watched as the autarch was carried across the great stone chamber, bobbing on his litter with lanterns hung at each corner, and suddenly felt his treacherous thoughts must be leaking out like blood through a bandage, or like the fever-sweat on Olin’s face. Perhaps everyone knew!

Badly frightened by the words of a condemned foreign enemy, the Paramount Minister of Xis hurried to his tent, seeking shadows and a chance to think.

“I can scarcely see anything,” Vansen whispered to the young warder Dolomite as he stared out into the blackness of the vast, low chamber. He had been told there was enough light from glowing fungus on the walls in most parts of the Mysteries for the Funderlings to see at least a bit, but Ferras Vansen thought he might as well have a bucket over his head. “I’m blind here!”

“That’s because you are an upgrounder, Captain Vansen.”

“Fortunately for us, then, Warder, so are our enemies.”

A moment later Dolomite whispered, “I think the southerners are breaking through the last of the rubble we stacked. Some have shuttered lanterns—even you could see them if they were a little closer, Captain!”

But Vansen had chosen this place at the opposite end of the wide Counting Room quite deliberately for his command post. The cavern floor was covered with broad, tablelike mounds of stone, and the cover they provided was why Vansen had decided to contest this cavern as fiercely as he could. He knew he would eventually have to give ground, but first he planned to make this stone room deadly for the Xixians. “Save your breath for the facts,” he told the young warder, making his voice harsh. “Jasper sent you to me to help me. If I have to argue with you, I’ll get another messenger and you’ll be making your explanations to Jasper.”

“Sorry, Captain.” The young fellow was clearly surprised, his voice unsteady. “Won’t… I won’t do it again.”

“No, you won’t. And speak more quietly. I may be an upgrounder, but even I know that sound travels strangely in caves.”

“You’re right, Captain. I beg your pardon.”

“Withheld, for now. Get on with it.” Doubtless the young warder was only trying to keep fear at bay. Still, it was distracting.

“Sir,” Dolomite said after another sustained silence, “a troop of southerners have formed up and look like… yes, they are moving forward. But these don’t look like Xixians!”

“Their emblem? Can you see one?”

“A wolf or a dog, Captain…”

“The autarch’s White Hounds,” Vansen said. “I wondered when we would see them. They are northerners—from Perikal, or at least their fathers were. Fierce as a wounded bear in a fight. How many?”

“Looks like one lantern for every ten or twelve, Captain. I can see… perhaps twenty lantern in the first mass of troops.”

“So many? And Jasper and the others?”

“Crouched out of sight. The Hound-men are still coming forward, but slowly. The ones in front have spears, but there are bowmen just behind them.”

“Can’t let them get too close. Tell me when they are halfway between the rest of their troop and Jasper’s rocks.”

Dolomite squinted. In the silence Vansen could hear his own blood throbbing in his temples. The White Hounds may be a couple of hundred trained soldiers, he told himself, but they’re the ones on unfamiliar ground. My men are fighting in their own fields. Still, he could not help thinking of the vast line of Xixians snaking back up the tunnels behind these ten or twelve score, swelling to fill the larger chambers with armed men, several thousand in all, their ranks eventually leading up to the encampment on the surface where twice that many soldiers waited. The Funderlings talked a great deal about rockslides, and this would be a rockslide of murderous humanity; no matter what heroics they performed or good fortune they might have, they would never overcome such odds.

“Those Hounds are almost halfway, Captain,” whispered Dolomite, startling Vansen out of his unkind thoughts. “Almost… almost…”

“Then give the signal!” Vansen said. “Here!” He handed up the lantern; the warder lifted its shutter and stood to hold it in the air above his head.

“Jasper’s seen it!”

“Then get down, man!” Vansen reached up and yanked hard, toppling him backward. As the lamp spun away, spattering burning oil as it bounced down the shallow slope, three arrows splintered against the stones just in front of them.

“Sorry, Captain…”

“Don’t apologize, Warder, just get back to work. They won’t be shooting at us again now that we’re dark. Tell me what you see. Are our crossbowmen taking any of them down?”

“Some, but there are many more arrows stuck in shields.”

“We could aim lower if the cursed floor wasn’t covered in lumps of stone. You Funderlings need to keep things a bit more tidy.”

“Captain?”

“Never mind, Dolomite. Tell me more.”

“They’re down low, those White Hound men, and they’re going forward only a little at a time, when their archers are firing. And…” He stopped, suddenly. “By the Elders,” he said then in a strangled voice, “that was Chrysolite. I know him!”

Vansen let him have a moment, but only that. “Many good men will fall. We need to make sure we take down more of theirs—many more. Report.”

“The Hounds have almost reached the place where our men wait. Ah! And now they come together, they come together… ! Oh, no, stop them! Don’t… !”

The cries of men fighting and dying now echoed so densely that Vansen could hardly hear what the Funderling was saying. “Dolomite, I need you to tell me what you see!”

“The southerners, the White Hounds, they’ve reached the rocks and they’re trying to push out Jasper and the others. They’re using spears. Oh, Elders, it is terrible to see!”

“Don’t see it, then, just tell me what’s in front of you. As if it were a picture in a book.”

“The… the southerners and ours are fighting very fiercely in the rocks. In some places, the Big Folk have pushed in between the stones and are fighting with our people in the open spaces. In others Jasper’s men have fallen back. Ah, there is Cinnabar bringing men to help them—they are all holding near the back of the rocks…” He stopped to lean even farther, so that Vansen reached up and grabbed the little man’s collar to prevent him from tumbling off the rock. “Oh, no, Captain! The southerners are getting past!”

“What does it look like?”

“Sorry, sir. Some of the White Hounds have found a way past along the edge of the cavern—they’re slipping by while the rest are fighting in the middle. They’ll be behind Jasper’s men in a moment… ah! Ah!”

“Keep talking, boy.”

“It’s bad now, sir! The White Hounds have gotten past on both sides of our soldiers. They’re surrounded, our men are surrounded; they’ll be overwhelmed… ! Let me go help!”

“No! Stay here. Curse this dark place!” Vansen fumbled in his pack. “How I wish I could see. Tell me things that are happening, Dolomite, not what you think might be happening. Are the White Hounds all around our men now?”

“Yes, sir. Almost as thick on this side as on the other. It’s a ring of torches all the way around… !”

“Good.” Vansen held something up. “Do you know what this is?”

He felt certain that the young warder was staring at him as though he had gone utterly mad. “It’s… it’s a cuttlehorn, sir. One of those stony seashells. Like the one the Brothers blow to call the monks to prayer.”

“Would you like the honor of blowing it, then?”

“Sir?”

He put it in the warder’s hands. “Blow it. Loud as you can. It is time to call those White Hound bastards to temple.”

After a long moment, a rasping, breathy note rose beside him, growing louder and louder until its triumphant clamor set echoes bouncing all over the Counting Room. In the shuddering aftermath of the horn’s call came a sudden roar from Malachite Copper’s Funderling troop, who had been hidden in the rocky slope above the place where the autarch’s soldiers had first entered the cavern, and now came streaming down onto the backs of the nearest White Hounds.

“There are Funderlings—Copper’s men!” said Dolomite excitedly. “They are attacking the upgrounders!”

“I know.”

“The killing is terrible, but they are forcing the White Hounds forward into the rocks! Some of Copper’s men are shooting crossbows into the entrance, keeping the other southerners out of the Counting Room.”

Vansen nodded. “It is time to sound the horn again, Warder Dolomite. You haven’t lost it, have you?”

“No, Captain!”

“Good. Then let them hear it once more. Let Sulepis himself hear it, somewhere back up the tunnel—let’s hope it makes his skin crawl!”

“Yes, Captain!” A moment later the mournful call rose again, louder than the first time, so loud that Vansen felt pleasantly sure that the Xixians who survived were going to remember it with fear.

“Those Hounds know they’re in a fight now!” Dolomite called a few moments later, having quite forgotten about silence. “And their other troops can’t get in to help them! Look, the autarch’s men are turning into hedgehogs, all spiked with arrows! Oh, Earth Elders, but they are still fighting.” His voice faltered a little. “So much blood!”

Vansen decided it was time for his next trick. He sent Dolomite down the slope to Corundum’s engineers to make certain they were ready, and while he waited for the young warder’s return, he hefted the weighty cuttlehorn in his hand. Brother Antimony, who had given it to him, had told him it was made from a creature of the ancient days that had turned into stone.

Turned to stone—just like the greedy merchant in that old story. Can even a mute creature offend the gods? Vansen didn’t know whether he understood all that Chaven and the others had told him, but he knew from his own experience that the gods’ power was everywhere and it was dangerous. He knew enough of the gods to fear them more than he had ever feared anything else, even failure and ridicule.

“Corundum says they’re ready,” Dolomite reported, his sudden, quiet approach making Vansen jump. It was harder than he had thought to sit in the empty black, to rely on the eyes of others, but he knew darkness was their greatest advantage over the autarch’s soldiers.

“Then we will fall back now while they are reeling.” He lifted the horn himself this time, and its call soared once more through the great stone chamber. The White Hounds flinched and crouched a little lower, waiting for whatever would follow this time. They did not seem to realize for long moments that their enemies were stealing quietly away from them toward the passage at the back end of the Counting Room. Vansen and Dolomite joined the retreating group.

The White Hounds finally let out a shout as they realized that the last horn call had signaled retreat. The autarch’s fiercest soldiers leaped forward, and with Malachite Copper’s crossbowmen gone, for the first time their comrades trapped in the entranceway could finally join them. Together, the invaders surged like a wave across the uneven cavern floor, ducking as an occasional bolt snapped invisibly past, their cries for revenge growing louder and more savage as they sensed that they at last had these surprising little men on the retreat.

“Let the first half dozen lantern-bearers through,” Vansen told the engineers as he and the others hurried out of the tunnel into Ocher Bar, the long cavern below the Counting Room.

So it was that when the first few dozen of the autarch’s men came out of the passage in a half-crouch, holding their shields up and their torches even higher to see what was before them, no horn had to be blown. The commander of the engineers waved his arm and his minions threw their weight against the great iron wedge the Funderlings had brought down from the quarry for just this purpose. Wedge-staves bent, the wood groaning and the men groaning louder, and for an instant it seemed they would fail. Then, even as the first of the White Hounds below them realized what was happening and began looking up into the darkness for something to aim an arrow at, the slab of stone shivered loose and slid down onto the men just below so suddenly that only the wounded survivors had a chance to scream. They did not scream long.

The passage between Ocher Bar and the Counting Room was now sealed, at least for a few hours. Copper’s crossbowmen loosed the rest of their bolts into the autarch’s soldiers, mostly White Hounds, who were trapped on the near side of the rockfall, then the rest of the Funderlings hurried forward to finish the job, dispatching even the helpless wounded before Vansen could stop them. He had not guessed there’d be such reserves of ferocity in the little folk.

Ferras Vansen came forward as the first lanterns were lit. He stood over the bodies of the autarch’s White Hounds, their armor so beautifully made and their beards so carefully braided. “Look at them,” he said. “They must have thought Death invited them to a wedding instead of a funeral.”

They came to a land they did not know, he thought, to kill people they did not know, simply because a madman told them to do it. He shoved them over with his foot, turning the nearest faces to the ground. Yes, they were soldiers too, like me. I feel for them—but I do not feel sorry.

The guards at the scotarch’s tent stepped aside, their eyes so firmly downcast that Paramount Minister Vash thought it a wonder they’d been able to see and identify him in the first place. The scotarch’s body servant, a eunuch almost as old as Pinimmon Vash, had the door open before Vash could even clear his throat.

“Come in, Paramount Minister,” the Favored said. “I will tell the Desert Kite that you are here. No doubt he will graciously offer you audience.”

Yes, thought Vash, he no doubt will, seeing as I can walk in when I want and Prusus can do nothing about it except to wag his head and make noises like a dying calf. “That is well,” was all he said aloud. What was the eunuch’s name? It was a curse to grow old. “And when you have announced me, and he has graciously agreed to the audience, perhaps you will be so good as to leave us alone for a space—the merest quarter of an hour.”

Vash would not have seen greater suspicion in the Favored’s face if he had announced he planned to put the scotarch in a sack and take him for a walk in the sun. “Great one, I do not understand,” was all the body servant came up with.

“No, you don’t. Come back after a short while, as I said. You shall find your master quite unharmed.”

The smooth-faced man looked very undecided, but at last bowed again and went into the larger part of the tent, which had been separated from the rest by screens showing silk pictures of sand larks guarding their nests at the base of some of desert shrub Vash could not identify. No one in his family had actually seen the deep desert for several generations. Of course he hadn’t ever wanted to be deep beneath the earth either, yet here he was.

The eunuch pulled back one of the inner screens and gestured him through with an appropriate amount of bowing, then ostentatiously let himself out of the tent, making enough noise that even if blindfolded Vash still could not have missed him leaving.

Vash walked to where Prusus sat, or rather leaned, in his traveling throne. It was a mark of how bizarre the autarch’s choice had been that Prusus had no attendants beyond the single eunuch, and only a handful of guards. Previous scotarchs had commanded retinues only outstripped by those of the autarch himself.

But previous scotarchs, even the worst of them, had been able to talk and had possessed at least a little wit. Their heads had not lolled on their shoulders like overcooked mushrooms. Still, if poor crippled Prusus was like a mushroom, then he must feel comfortable here, down in the depths where such things thrived.

“Good afternoon, Chosen One, if it is indeed still afternoon.” Vash bowed. “Please do not let me disturb you. I have come only to look for something.” He gazed at the empty, rolling eyes, wondering if he would see any recognition there. “King Olin said I should listen to you.” He could not help smiling and, in fact, almost laughed. “Which is, of course, a sort of code, since you don’t actually speak. But I believe I may have underestimated you—as have many others. I believe you are not as addled as we thought. So tell me with your eyes, if you understand me. Did he leave something for me? Did Olin leave something for me?”

For a moment, as if his task could be accomplished only with a supreme effort of will, Prusus stopped shaking. He stretched forward his head as though trying to fall out of his chair—as though terror had gripped him and he sought escape. Vash fought back anger of his own. Why should he be forced to sully himself treating with a mismade creature like this? Then he realized that Prusus was looking fixedly in one direction, toward his own lap, and that he might have been trying to use his head to point the way.

Vash leaned in. There, clutched in the scotarch’s bony fist, was a wisp of white—a piece of parchment.

“Ah,” said Vash. “ ‘Look to the scotarch for help,’ he said. Very clever.” He reached out and fastidiously wiggled loose the folded scrap of parchment without touching the skin of the scotarch’s hand. “And what treason against our beloved Golden One does the enemy king propose?” He said this for the benefit of any listeners, who always had to be assumed in the court of Sulepis, as in the courts of the autarch’s father and grandfathers.

The parchment was unsigned, and from the clumsiness of the letters been written in a hurry.

Just looking at such a thing made Vash feel as if he stood in an icy wind, that he held a restless, angry viper in his hand. He knew he must destroy it, and quickly. Whether he remembered the words written in it or not, whether he let himself think about them or not, he would have to make sure nobody ever saw this piece of paper. Avin Brone indeed! Pinimmon Vash looked around, suddenly feeling like a thief forced to walk slowly down the street with stolen goods bulging in his pocket. Did he dare carry it all the way back to his own tent where he could burn it in his brazier?

Something made a bubbly, sighing noise nearby. Vash, his thoughts racing so fast he could barely move, looked absently at the scotarch, whose mouth was already moving again. This time Vash realized that the eerie noise, a nasal moan punctuated by wet sloshes of consonants, was actually somebody speaking words, and that with a little concentration he could even understand what was being said.

“Parsshhhmen isssh… shmalll…” Prusus repeated, his hand clenching and wriggling in the air as though it had its own life, its own secret joys and sorrows. “Jushh eaddd iddd…”

The parchment is small, he was saying. Just eat it.

Astonished, Vash did. It almost stuck in his throat, but he got it down at last.

22. Damnation Gate

The sun had burned the fog off the bay and Southmarch Castle’s tall towers glinted in the sun from behind the great outer walls as they stretched toward heaven, each a different color, each with its own peculiarities of design. In ordinary circumstances it would have been an impressive sight, but to Qinnitan, a prisoner being taken to the one man on earth she was most terrified of seeing again, the sight meant nothing except failure and horror and the power of inescapable Fate: the gods were clearly bent on humbling her for trying to avoid the destiny they had assigned her.

As Qinnitan watched the approaching castle, she suddenly felt something she hadn’t experienced for months, the sensation that had swept through her when the high priest Panhyssir had force-fed her his terrible potions: the world was not solid. It was as fragile as a bubble, and things waited beneath it. She could feel one of those things this moment. It was alive to her presence and unfazed by distance, because even though it lay more than a mile away across the cold waters of Brenn’s Bay and buried beneath hundreds of feet of stone, it was also beside her, even inside her. Qinnitan could sense its interest—it felt her just as strongly as she felt it. Couldn’t any of the other people on the deck of the troop ship feel its ghastly, intrusive presence as she did?

Why did you leave me, Barrick? Why did you stop talking to me? I’m so frightened… !

But it was pointless to mourn. Wherever he was, Barrick was only a mortal. In fact, like Qinnitan herself he was little more than a child: he couldn’t do anything to save her from Sulepis, let alone from the gods themselves.

The sun was far too bright. Daikonas Vo knew it must be Hexamene now, almost summer, but the light still seemed too strong, a glare all around him as though he walked over a bank of blazing, white-hot coals.

“First rays, Nushash praise,” he said out loud. When he was a child, his mother had always said that when she got out of bed in the morning, although she didn’t say it much as he got older. Strange—he hadn’t thought about the bitch in what seemed like years. Fitting that excruciating pain should bring his memories of her back.

As they rode a light tide into the docks in mainland Southmarch, the little cog stuffed with traders and their goods slipped between half a dozen Xixian warships lying at anchor or being escorted into harbor. The sailors on these other ships, unless they were in the middle of some task, watched Daikonas Vo and the others crowded on the cog’s deck. He was still the object of much attention from the crew—a ragged beggar who had somehow commanded a place on a vessel the autarch had commandeered—but Vo did not intend stealth. If the girl from the Seclusion was being taken to Sulepis, perhaps had reached him already, it was far too late for stealth.

The deeper Vo walked into the camp the more eyes followed him. Men began calling to him, shouting at him to stop and tell who he was, did he think beggars could simply walk in among the tents of the famous White Hounds? Vo knew a few of his old comrades were following him. Ordinarily, he would have thought nothing of turning and confronting them. None of the White Hounds were cowards, but Vo had a way of looking at people, even very strong, very fierce people, that seemed to remind them that there were still things they wanted to do in life. But he dared not waste time.

He grunted and had to stop for a moment, bending double with his arms clutching hard across his belly, trying to keep his jaws clenched, to keep in the scream fighting so hard to get out. It was like a hot coal with legs crawling back and forth in his guts.

None of his old troop had recognized him yet; he must look like a beggar indeed. He finally managed to fight down the pain and straightened up before any of the soldiers confronted him. His goal was only a few dozen paces away, so he set off toward it, trying not to stagger, trying not to show any weakness that would make them hurry after him again, that might prompt them to pull him down like jackals on a wounded lion. Or to try, at any rate: Daikonas Vo knew he would kill them all first if he had to—fingers in eyes, kicking even as he heard bones snapping, all his weight pushing his hard forearm down until the other man’s throat collapsed....

Vo could taste blood in his mouth. He spun around, arms up, ready to protect himself, but the soldiers who had been watching him had not followed. They were laughing among themselves, watching him stagger and twitch and talk to himself. Vo was full of shame. How bad was he? Had he pissed himself, too?

Shuddering, his guts like knotted, burning rags, he turned back and stumbled toward the quartermaster’s tent.

Vasil Zeru looked up as he entered but clearly did not recognize his face: he curled his lip at Vo’s appearance and turned back to scolding one of his underlings.

“Zeru, it’s me, Vo,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “Daikonas Vo.”

It still took a moment more for the look of recognition to come. “By the fiery boots of the Lord, is that truly you? You look like you caught fire and someone put you out with a Thunderman’s saber.”

“I am…” he clenched his teeth again, waited for the spasm to pass, “I am in need of your help. And your private counsel.”

The quartermaster understood. He sent the underlings away. “We have all wondered about… about your mission.”

“Yes. I am in the Golden One’s service,” Vo told him, “on a special mission. I must reach him as quickly as I can. But there are enemies, traitorous, high-ranking enemies who wish to stop me.… I have information the autarch must see!” He swayed, and that was entirely genuine, but it seemed to impress the quartermaster as well. Vasil Zeru was a hard man, but unlike most of the other officers his cruelty was impartial and meant as discipline. He had no wife, no son. The White Hounds were the closest he had to family, and he took his responsibilities very seriously. Vo, who had always made the other White Hounds uneasy, was exactly what Zeru liked in his unit—a clean-living, quiet and able professional soldier. So he believed, at least; Daikonas Vo’s other pastimes were unknown to him.

“I will help you, of course,” Vasil Zeru told him. “God’s blazing blood, of course I will! Is it that old pantaloon, Vash? There is a devil who never lifted a blade or a bow himself, but would be quick to have someone else done in.” He shook his head. “The kind that thinks nothing of sending soldiers to do every filthy task.…”

“May Nushash bless you!” Vo was able to make it sound convincing because of the relief he was feeling; the pain in his gut had suddenly lessened. “I will tell the autarch of your service to him, of how you helped when others would not.”

Old Zeru actually looked a little flushed with sentiment. “It is nothing,” he said, but he seemed pleased. “What any good soldier would do for our great Falcon!”

“Do you have some water?” Vo asked suddenly. The retreating agony had left his throat ash-dry and his head as light as smoke. “To drink? ” His voice sounded far away.

Then he fainted.

“By my ancestors!” said the young priest as he looked Qinnitan up and down. “What am I supposed to do with her?”

“Take her off our hands, Brother,” the soldier on her left said. “Captain said if we even had a bit of fun with her, they’d have our heads. She’s to go to the Golden One, or to His Radiance, the high priest.”

“Panhyssir himself?” The young, shaven-headed priest straightened as if that almost incomprehensible presence had just entered the room. “And the Golden One? Well, of course. That is, someone should take responsibility for this.” He swallowed, half-smiling, looking at Qinnitan but no longer seeing her. After her time in the Seclusion, she knew the look of all-conquering ambition. This creature wouldn’t let her out of his sight until he had made certain everyone had seen him deliver her to the highest circle he could reach.

Qinnitan slumped between the two guards; her chains rattled. In truth the irons were too big for her—the Xixian military generally expected most prisoners to be larger than a girl her age—and were scraping her skin raw. She could have slipped out of them easily, but a reflex told her not to give that away yet. Still, the guards themselves had not seemed very worried about her causing trouble.

The young priest was called Brother Gunis. He wasn’t just an under-priest of the War Chariot of Nushash, he explained as she slumped on the floor against the wall of the shrine-tent: he had already been chosen to become a true priest, but after he brought her to Panhyssir—or even to the Golden One himself, praises to his name, may the Falcon of Bishakh forever fly—he would almost certainly become a speaking-priest, a high honor indeed.

“But I have done nothing wrong,” she protested. “I am a priestess of Nushash myself—I was part of the Hive. I’m still a virgin. Do you understand that I will be tortured if you do this, Brother Gunis? That I’ll be killed?”

He paused for a moment and then his mouth set in a line, as if he was frightened something might get out… or in. “If you are a prisoner, then you should repent your crimes,” he said. “Everyone knows that the Golden One is generous beyond other men, forgiving beyond even the gods themselves!” He nodded. “Yes, give me your hand, girl. Let us pray for your forgiveness together.”

She did not have the strength to fight him. Qinnitan let Brother Gunis clutch her hand tightly in his own moist, warm grasp. The young priest had a gleam in his eyes that had nothing to do with her, or at least not with her fleshly presence: he was seeing the glory that might be in his future. Qinnitan winced as he began to pray aloud. It was the New Catechism, the one the young autarch himself had written. This Gunis was either very ambitious, or he was a true believer. Either way, he would do nothing to help her.

Gunis took a pair of guards with him, sullen Hakka Slingers who looked as though they’d rather be drinking fermented milk than dealing with a priest and—as they had clearly decided after looking her up and down in an unimpressed manner—a scrawny girl not even worth the effort of rape. They straightened up when they heard that she was bound for the Golden One himself, but clearly did not expect to get far up the chain of command before being relieved of the duty: ordinary soldiers did not get to meet the Master of the Great Tent.

The soldiers led her and Gunis across the camp and out toward the southwestern edge of the harbor, where the city ended in rocky beaches and a few piers used by some of the poorer Southmarch fishermen. Here the hills that ringed the side of the bay came down almost to the water, and wind-carved chunks of standing stone marched down even beyond the edge of the hills, so that some of them stuck up from the bay itself like crooked teeth. The rocky sides of the hills that loomed above the beach as though they had been sliced with a great carving knife were white and soft pigeon-gray with tracings of greenery at the top, but it was the black holes along the beach that caught her eye and held it. She knew she had no choice, but it was still all she could do to make one foot follow the other toward those dark, ominous openings.

Once, when she was a child, Qinnitan’s family had gone out to the coast of Xis for her great-grandmother’s funeral. Afterward, while the adults had been singing songs and drinking, some of her relatives had taken her and her siblings down to the ocean to look at the tidal flats. It had been a strange place, especially for someone like Qinnitan, used to being surrounded on all sides by buildings and people. One of her cousins had tried to pull her into the mouth of one of the bigger caves, but she had refused to go, even when her younger brothers had agreed. She had remained on the rocks instead, splashing in the shallow waters of the ocean pools, waiting for what seemed like hours. At last the rest of the children had come back and, although she had felt bad for being afraid, Qinnitan had not been sorry to miss the adventure. The dark holes had reminded her of what her father used to tell her about Xergal the Earth-lord, one of the enemies of great Nushash: “He lives in the ground, do you see? So far down that the sun can’t reach, and it’s cold, so cold. And he hates it there, and he hates Nushash and the rest of the Ugeni tribe for banishing him. And so he wants nothing more than to get his hands on bad little children who don’t love Nushash, and keep them for himself.”

He had been talking about wicked Xergal stealing those children’s spirits and keeping them in his harsh, dark underworld for all eternity, but it had been easy for Qinnitan to see that if you went under the ground, especially in a place as fearful-looking as those caves, you were as much as offering yourself to the cold, dark, angry lord of the earth.

Thus it was that when she should already have been as frightened as she could be, Qinnitan discovered that she had reserves of terror untapped until now. By the time they reached the elaborate guard post built at the entrance to the central cavern, she was fighting back tears of exhaustion and fright. Although the opening in the cliff wall stretched far above her head, she stared down at her feet as the guards, after an exchange with the young priest, ushered them past the gate and inside. Both guards took torches from the pile and lit them in the brazier by the gate. Within moments the doorway and the actual light of the sky were behind her and Qinnitan was being led down into immense, flickering darkness.

The autarch’s troops had made a road of sorts through the main cavern—carved flat and wide where it had been too narrow for the wheels of small supply wagons, scratched and covered with gravel where the limestone was too slippery, until it almost looked like one of the supply roads leading in and out of the massive camp outside. But this was no ordinary road; it led through a strange fairyland of stone pillars, most of them on the floor of the outer cavern, whose shadows stretched and gyrated on the cavern walls as the guards walked past with their torches. Then at the edge of the cavernous anteroom the road tilted down and began its back and forth progress into the depths, lit by the occasional torch wedged into a pile of rocks by the road. From time to time they passed another guard station or an empty supply wagon heading back to the surface, but otherwise the only people Qinnitan saw were the three accompanying her, eager Brother Gunis and the two bored guards, who spent much of their time talking quietly to each other.

Some hundred feet below the earth, the torchlight revealed a trickle of water dripping from the slabs that made up the walls, and Qinnitan realized they must now be underneath the bay itself. The water dripped through in several places from above, creating little ponds on the rock floor that overtopped and flowed away down the cracks into darkness.

As they passed out of that cavern into a larger one, Qinnitan could suddenly see a long distance downward as the track wound around the outside of a huge open cavern at least a hundred feet deep. The stone track had been replaced by huge wooden structures like bridges that seemed to be hung directly on the side of the cavern and which together made a single continuous road winding all the way to the bottom. The cavern was full of torches; dozens of soldiers, maybe hundreds, were moving in and out of various holes at the base of the wall, presumably a series of tunnels leading off in different directions like the spokes of a wagon’s wheel. From this height the soldiers looked like ants, and Qinnitan had the sudden, unpleasant sensation that she was being led deeper and deeper into something that was not actually a human thing at all.

“It is wonderful, what our autarch has done here,” Gunis said to the guards. “Have you men dug this all out in such a short time?”

The soldiers shared a look. “The caves run all through here and also underneath the bay and the island,” one of them said. “The miners didn’t have to do much, to tell the truth.”

“Still, it is wonderful.” Gunis clasped his hands together on his breast and offered an ostentatious prayer of thanks to Nushash.

Qinnitan hardly noticed him. As they walked down the inclined walkway, their footfalls now booming on wood instead of swishing through gravel, something had reached up from below, something invisible but incredibly strong, and fastened itself around her like a cold hand, making it suddenly hard to draw breath.

It knew she was here. She could feel it turning her over in its thoughts. It knew she was here… and it was very hungry.

I’ve seen this before, Daikonas Vo thought as he faced the cliff and the great uneven black door. It’s the Damnation Gate. It was something else his mother had spoken of—in fact, the night his father had killed her she had spat at him and said that evil spirits were going to drag him down to the Damnation Gate so that Xergal’s servants could flay off his skin. Vo’s father had not liked that, and in the course of expressing his displeasure he had broken Vo’s mother’s neck.

But this, he thought, this was not mere words: this was the thing itself. Yermun the Gatekeeper must be watching from inside, wearing his skin backward as he was said to do. Yermun, the brother of Xergal—“Immon” and “Kernios” to the northerners—was a bit of a hero to the White Hounds, who considered themselves to be lifelong prisoners in a foreign land just as Immon himself, powerful though he might be, was a prisoner in Kernios’ dread realm.

Brothers in Hell, the old White Hounds’ song ran, come running to the fight, and Heaven take the slowest!

With his clean new armor and his beard trimmed to something resembling Xixian military standard, Vo walked into the mouth of shadow. The pain in his gut was beginning again, that feeling like dirty claws scratching at the tenderest parts of him; it was all he could do to walk straight instead of stumbling like a daytime drunk. The guards at their post outside the huge hill entrance stopped him for a moment, perhaps troubled by something strange in his eyes, but Zeru had given him the code of the day and so they let him pass.

The pain became even stronger as Vo walked down into the great tunnel.

I am cursed. I have lost my wager. I took service with the autarch’s Hounds because it gave me license to do as I pleased, but I could not let well enough be. Because I wanted something more, I won a place in the autarch’s special service, and now that “something more” is killing me. I have lost a wager and the autarch, as he always does, has won. Someone else will get credit for my hard labor and I will die like a gutted animal.

He could not think about it. It did not make the pain in Daikonas Vo’s body worse but it made his very mind hurt, spread a red, glaring fog in his mind that confused him, and made him fear he might stumble off the path into some deep place.

Vo saw her at last from the top of the great cavern the Xixian soldiers called “Xergal’s Tent.” He knew it was the autarch’s whore even though she was far below him at the bottom of the chamber, knew her as if she were family, and although he could see scarcely anything from his vantage point except her black hair as she walked captive between two soldiers, he knew her shape and posture as a lover would. Her big, dark eyes would be half-shut, her thin face quietly mournful and her thoughts turned inward into one of those great, long silences that had impressed even Vo. He had never met a woman who could stay such a time in her own thoughts, except a whore he had bought once whose tongue had been cut out by a previous client.

He hurried down the creaking ramp that wound its way around the cavern wall. The girl and her captors were still standing in the middle of the moving crowd, facing a wall with several tunnel mouths of several sizes, when the thing in his middle grabbed at both his gut and his heart at the same time. Vo staggered, gasping, feeling as though some terrible fire had burst through the walls of his belly and would consume him entirely. For a moment the next torch down the path shrank to a spark and he could not get any air into his lungs, but then after a little blackness, Vo discovered that although he had fallen onto his hands and knees, he could breathe—and think—once more. He got up and began to stagger downward again, but could no longer see the girl and her guards below. They had chosen one of the tunnels.

By the time he reached the bottom, the pain had let up enough for him to talk.

“Which? Which way for the high officers’ compound?” he demanded of a Naked infantryman.

The man seemed to recognize the White Hound badge, if not Vo himself, so he replied respectfully. “The officers’ tents—go to that one, there.” He pointed to one side. “That’s your fastest way.”

Vo let him go and hurried toward the opening, staggering as he went. He knew there was little chance that he would recover the girl even if he caught up with her—how could he kill two guards without anyone knowing? The girl herself would give him away, just to see him tortured and executed. His work, his suffering, had all been for nothing. He had truly walked of his own will through the Damnation Gate.

He followed the path downward for what seemed most of an hour, in places having to shoulder through men clustered around some half-done task or other. The autarch’s engineers and their slaves were still working in the tunnels even after the strange subterranean invasion had begun, widening and strengthening them. Vo could half-imagine that by the time they were finished the caverns would have become a replica of the Orchard Palace, all high ceilings and white stone facing. In fact, if the autarch stayed true to his youthful direction, perhaps the entire world would become a single Orchard Palace, and everyone in it either one of the autarch’s soldiers or whores or slaves.

It should have been me. But he is clever. He can see things as clearly as I can, almost, and he was born into power and riches. I never had a chance—but it should have been me. This should have been mine; the world should have been mine, not an Orchard Palace but a Palace of Vo as wide as the world… !

He wandered along the narrowing path, his mind filled with the thoughts of his world-palace and what each room would contain, until the complexity of the instruments he would need and the number of victims his schemes would require made his head whirl, and he suddenly stopped. For a moment, he thought the terrible gut-pain was coming back—it was just such a nervous stab that generally alerted him—then he slowly realized what it was that had stopped him.

The road had come to an end.

Daikonas Vo looked down at the blackness, the sudden, violent falling away of the earth. He had almost walked into empty air.

He turned and made his way carefully back up the path, only noticing now that it was very narrow indeed, that he had not been following a proper Xixian military road for some time. Had he turned somewhere? Several tunnels had crossed his track earlier, but they had all been smaller than the empty space through which he walked and he had passed them all by. What had happened?

Vo made his way back up the track, following it along the side of a deep drop that gradually grew shallower until the echoes all but stopped. He was circling a deep cavern on a path around its rim, and must be getting closer to the bottom with each circuit, but nothing he could find seemed anything like the wide road that had brought him here. It was not a small chamber: it took him the better part of an hour to go all the way around, just to make sure.

Still, after another long climb up another featureless stone track between two long, leaning slabs, with only an occasional army torch stuck in crevices on the wall to supplement the light he carried, Vo had to admit that this did not look much like anything he remembered from before. Some of it didn’t look like it was Xixian work at all. He wondered if they had foreign engineers and workers down here as well.

Whatever had happened, Vo had clearly lost his chance of catching up with the girl, at least by any conventional pursuit. Ah, gods, and now the pain was coming back again, he realized, the gnawing in his guts.

For a moment he could only stand, his shadow fluttering out behind him like a king’s coronation train. It hurt so badly! He tasted blood. Everything in him told him to escape it, but there was no escape… unless he tore it out… tore out his entire belly.…

A sudden movement made Vo go still as a statue, his killer’s instincts strong enough to overcome even the fire in his guts, if only for a moment. Someone was crossing the path a few dozen yards below him, crossing from one hidden passage to another on the far side of the path. Vo shrank back into shadow and watched with bated breath.

It was a boy—a northern boy, several years short of man’s age and height, with hair that even in this dark place seemed to gleam like palest gold, and he moved through the tunnel as though he felt comfortable there. It was like looking at one of his mother’s woodcut pictures of the Orphan. What could a child be doing in such a place by himself? What did it mean?

A sudden thought occurred to him—could it be the work of the gods? Had they decided at last to show Daikonas Vo their favor, after all his misery? To lead him to the girl so that he would receive the rewards he so richly deserved?

Vo made himself move forward. He had already passed through the Damnation Gate, through which Vo’s mother had always told him there was no return save the Orphan’s—and now, as if out of his mother’s rambling tales, here came the child, in a place no child should be. Could it truly be a sign? Vo decided he would be a fool to think otherwise: he would follow the pale-haired boy.

A perfect vessel of despair, a perfect agent of chaos, Daikonas Vo straightened his back and followed the golden child down into deeper darkness.

“She’s a skinny one. Do you think she’s really going to the autarch?”

“Maybe he likes them like that.”

“But they say his first wife has a rump like a prize mare.”

Qinnitan curled her lip and tried to ignore the guards, even though they were walking just behind her and not talking quietly at all.

“Still, look at her—scarcely more than a child.”

“She’s got that red witch-streak. They say that’s a sign of a temper—that they’re like cats, you try to have your way with one and they’ll scratch you into sandal straps.”

“Ho! That makes her sound much more interesting.”

Brother Gunis, the young priest, finally intervened. “Here, now,” he said, turning on the soldiers. “You are talking about the Golden One’s prisoner, which is bad enough, but if I had been listening to your filthy tongues wagging, I would have heard you insult Queen Arimone, too, and that could send you both to the royal strangler.”

The guards murmured an apology. Gunis turned around, his head held high.

“Prig,” she heard one guard say quietly.

“Never touched a woman, that one,” the other muttered. “No stones left.”

Some of the tunnels were narrow enough that Qinnitan and her captors had to back up if a cart was coming the other way so that the vehicle could get by. Most of the carts were loaded with dirt and chunks of ore coming back up from places where the engineers were still working, but others carried more disturbing cargo, corpses loosely wrapped in the soldiers’ own cloaks, bare feet protruding because their boots, which they themselves might have received from another dead man, had been passed on to another soldier.

What more proof did any of these men need, Qinnitan wondered, that they were nothing to their master Sulepis but murderous toys? When the life was out of one it was stripped of anything useful and then thrown on a midden heap.

The number of shrouded corpses that passed them moved Qinnitan in conflicting ways. She had long since given up hope of ultimate escape for herself, but she was heartened to see that these northerners were resisting the autarch. Still, every one of these shapes bouncing lifelessly past on the wagons was a young man of Xis or its dependent countries, no different from her own brothers or even poor, mad Jeddin.

But if the autarch won here, or did whatever it was he had come for, so far away from Great Xis, then it seemed soon the entire world would be nothing more than food for his greed and cruelty. Soon even the oceans would not offer escape from his rule—he would hold all lands everywhere in his grip. Sulepis was young enough and powerful enough, and he was certainly mad enough, to make that horror real.

They had reached the edge of the military’s subterranean camp. They were still far above any fighting, although Qinnitan could hear traces of it for the first time, faint, distant shouts and the occasional boom of something that almost sounded like cannons. The guards who stopped them now seemed much more intent and cautious than the others they’d seen so far, and certainly more so than the ragtag soldiers who had accompanied them down from the surface. A mulasim had even come out to question them, an officer wearing the infantry crest of the Naked.

“If she is bound to the Golden One, then we will take her to him,” the officer said. “Or rather, we will take her to the Leopards, who will take her to the minister in charge, who will decide what happens next.”

“But I must…” Gunis began.

“With all respect, Brother,” the captain said, “you must do nothing except what you are told. If the prisoner is so important, why did you bring her without even the seal of your superior?”

“The seal?” Gunis seemed dazzled and confused by the mere idea. “Do you mean I should take her all the way back to the high chaplain?”

“I’m not saying anything.” The mulasim was a squat, grizzled man with the skeptical face of a market peddler but the arms of a wrestler. Now he stepped up until he was face-to-face with the young priest; the soldier was no taller, but a great deal bigger. “I’m saying that this is a problem, and you haven’t helped me any by showing up.” He scowled fiercely and looked around. “I’ll need at least two men to take her forward, and the gods know, I’ve none to spare.”

“But I have two guards… !”

The captain laughed. “These?” he said, gesturing at the soldiers who had accompanied them from the surface. “These two pricklepigs? Fat lot of good they’d have been if you’d run into a pack of those Yisti devils coming up out of the ground! No, you two can turn and hurry back to your important work guarding the dung pits. Go on with you, or I’ll have you in irons just like this little girl!”

The guards did not need another warning. They were already a dozen hurrying steps away when Gunis finally found his breath. “What about me? I… I was entrusted with this girl. I must be the one to accompany her.”

“Entrusted?” The officer looked from Qinnitan to the monk. “By slavers?” He turned back to Qinnitan. “Do you speak any of our tongue, child?”

For a moment Qinnitan was too surprised to have been addressed to say anything. “Yes. I am Xixian. Please, do not send me to the Golden One! I was taken by mistake from the Hive.…”

The captain glared. “I asked you a question, not to sing all the verses of the Morning Prayer. In a million, million years I would not interfere with something that was a matter for the Golden One, or at least those around him, to decide.” He turned back to survey the men in his vicinity. “Now, who to send… ?”

Somebody shouted, then there was a loud crash. Everyone around Qinnitan turned. A cartload overstacked with stones had run one of its wheels off the track on the level just above and the cart was wobbling precariously, half off the edge. A moment later it overtipped and several of the stones fell, sending the men staring up at it from below jumping hurriedly out of the way. The cart wobbled and then the whole mass slowly toppled over and broke into pieces on the stony ground below, sending rocks bounding in all directions.

Qinnitan did not need to be invited: she ran, shaking the loose shackles off her wrists as she went. She did not have time to think, but simply chose the nearest passage leading out of the wide chamber and sprinted toward it, sharp stones poking through the flimsy Marchland shoes the farmer’s wife had given her to wear.

Darkness punctuated with the glow of torches. Men’s faces turning toward her as she ran, some with their mouths open like masks of roaring demons, shouting questions at her. Qinnitan knew her one chance was to get out of sight of any witnesses and then hide.

A soldier snatched at her as she dashed past, and although he could not hold her, his brief grasp made her stumble. As she wobbled, trying to get her weary legs back beneath her, somebody else stuck out a foot, and she tripped and fell hard on the stony ground.

“What’s this?” someone demanded in a harsh desert accent as she lay whimpering and trying to catch her breath. “A spy?”

She did not get up, or at least did not remember getting up. A moment later something hit her hard on the back of her head and drove the rest of the thoughts away.

It was the bees. She knew that buzzing, had felt it deep in her bones and guts many times. On a day when the bees were said to be happy they could be marked throughout the Hive, a sturdy rumble so low it was felt, not heard.

It had all been a dream, then—just a dreadful dream. Duny was in the next bed and soon they would be up, washing their hair together in cold water. She would tell her friend the silly dream she’d had and they would laugh—as if little Qinnitan, who scarcely had grown breasts, would ever be chosen as a wife of the great autarch! All the girls would laugh, but Qinnitan didn’t mind. She was happy to be in her home, and safe—watched over by the bees, and by the priestesses, and even by great Father Nushash himself.

But why did the buzzing of the sacred Bees of Nushash have words… ?

“… is Panhyssir? You summoned… hour…”

“… too much. The high priest would… than he…”

Her head hurt. Her knees hurt. Her arm hurt badly. She wondered if it might be broken. What had happened?

“Enough, Vash, you are tiring me, walking around flapping your hands like an old woman. Besides, she is awake.” The friendly warmth, the feeling of safety, both vanished in an instant. Qinnitan knew that voice.

“Awake?”

“Can’t you tell? Her breathing has changed. She is lying there, bent like a bow, trying not to be noticed. And she succeeded—at least with you!” The laugh, high-pitched and musical, only made her guts churn. It was like listening to music made with instruments of human bone and skin.

Someone bent over her—even through closed lids she could see the shadow. Whoever he was, he smelled like fruit pomanders and scented oil. “Are you sure, Golden One?”

She wanted to throw up. She wanted to cry out.

“More than sure.” Another laugh. “Give her a little love-pat on the cheek. Open up your eyes, my frightened bride! You have returned to your rightful master at last.”

She did not want to see. She did not want to know. The worst had finally happened.

“Open your eyes, or I will have them opened in a way you won’t like.” Still, he spoke sweetly, reasonably. Qinnitan gave up and looked at him, feeling empty and deathly cold inside.

Sulepis was unchanged, taller than any man she knew, handsome and golden-skinned as he reclined on a mound of cushions that covered most of the floor of a large, lamplit tent hung with costly fabrics and mirrors. The autarch wore his golden falcon helmet, golden finger-stalls, and golden sandals, but nothing else. His brown flesh appeared smoother than any mere human skin, as though he had been carved from soapstone.

He raised his hand toward her, spreading his long fingers as though he could stretch them out from a dozen feet away and wrap them around her. “Your blood flows true, priest’s daughter. Your heritage feels the nearness of destiny, of the great change coming to this world, and draws you to me. You have returned just in time.” He smiled, a brilliant slash of white across his narrow face that in someone else would have looked joyous, but which was inhuman as a crocodile’s smirk. The autarch had her—for all her frantic labors, she had failed and it had all come to nothing.

He pointed a long, gold-tipped finger. “You are a rare one, child, and that should be rewarded. I promise you will die last so you can see it all—yes, you will see me put on glory like a cloak of peacock feathers.…”

23. A Storm of Wings

The names and the visions crowded in on Barrick like beggars—the moment just before the charge, repeated over and over again throughout the People’s history like a nightmarish ritual…

The Ghostwood, where the Dreamless waited in their shrouds, invisible in the twilight, all their handpicked stratimancers whispering death-songs at the same moment so that the whole forest rustled, though no wind was blowing…

… Shivering Plain, where Yasammez fought her enemies in armor that glowed scarlet like sword-iron in a forge…

… the screams around Giant’s Cairn and the horrors that had waited for the first riders to top Blue Wolf Ridge…

All those terrible moments crowded in on him, or at least the Fireflower’s memories of those moments, all the times the People had fought with their very survival at stake, all those dull, painful martyrdoms that together were called the Long Defeat. Even with his eyes closed, the phantoms still surrounded Barrick, a thousand different voices from a hundred different ages, all that the Fireflower had seen and heard and thought now swept through him like crackling sparks.

We have always fought and we have always lost—even when we won… Winding through it all came a faint, dry thought he could scarcely pick out from the cloud of memory and lamentation—a whiff of humor dry as dust. Perhaps someday we should try to win by losing…

Ynnir, my lord! Will you stay with me?

But that intimate stranger’s voice had already trailed away into silence.

Barrick’s Qar armor felt no heavier than another layer of skin and the laurel helm fit him just as comfortably. But the thing he wore most lightly was his own self, which seemed no more substantial—a fraction of the weighty whole, a flame to its candle. Barrick felt utterly careless, even fearless: to die would only be to lose his body and float away as all the thoughts and memories that had been Barrick Eddon scattered like dandelion fluff. And the Qar memories inside me, the Fireflower kings… they would be scattered, too… ?

Saqri came toward him in her white-and-blue war armor. She looked Barrick up and down and did not say anything, but he knew her well enough to see the single mote of disquiet—the subtle, tiny trace which was recognizable to the Fireflower only because of generations of experience with the women of Crooked’s descent. “The last of the Xixian column has just passed on their way down from the surface,” she announced quietly. “Be ready.” She turned and walked away.

“She is not like Yasammez,” said a deep, rumbling voice beside him. “She does not like killing, even when she must.”

Barrick turned to discover massive Lord Hammerfoot standing near him—and not just Hammerfoot, but a spectral blur of all the Ettins that the custodians of the Fireflower had ever known, so many memories that, if Barrick did not concentrate, they fogged his mind like winter glass. The master of the Ettins stared back at him, the burning coals of his eyes barely visible beneath the helmet that further shadowed his great, ugly face. “I will watch out for you, Barrick of the Eddons, fear not.” The creature’s voice was so deep that Barrick could scarcely understand him. Hammerfoot slapped at his ax, a monstrous thing with a blade half the size of a small table. “Give me a lot of room when I start swinging Chastiser here. He’s a big lad, needs a lot of room when he gets playful.” He patted the massive ax. “You may soon notice, Barrick Eddon, that unlike Saqri, I enjoy killing men. Do not take it amiss.”

“You… you speak my tongue… our—what do you call us, sunlanders?” Barrick asked. “You speak our sunlander tongue very well.”

“Used to hunt your folk and eat them, to tell it square,” Hammerfoot admitted. “Means I had to live close enough to get to know them.” The Ettin didn’t seem to be joking now. He shook his broad head. “Who would ever have thought… ?”

Barrick could not easily of summon anything to say to that.

A silent signal from Saqri sent the drows forward at last, scuttling down the uneven passage in almost complete silence. Hammerfoot stepped out after them, his footfalls so heavy Barrick could feel them through his own bones. “Stay with me, human,” Hammerfoot growled. “Even better, stay behind me. And do everything I tell you.”

The Fireflower specters were singing excitedly in Barrick’s head and the drows were running, and a few moments later they all burst out of the passageway and into the wider corridor known as the Great Delve, which led ultimately under the bay and up to the Xixian camp on the far side of the water—Saqri’s goal. The troops who had marched past on their way to join the autarch below had already vanished.

The drows and Hammerfoot did not hesitate, turning in the opposite direction and hurrying up the wide track toward the world above. Barrick sped to a trot, grateful for the solid but featherweight Qar armor. He had just looked back to see Saqri and the others pouring out of the branch-tunnel behind him when a roar from Hammerfoot made him stumble and almost fall.

Just ahead, a Xixian platoon had appeared around a bend of the passage. They shouted in alarm at the sight of the approaching Qar and quickly ranged themselves across the road, raising their shields to head height and leveling their spears in bristling formation, but even in the dim light of the tunnel’s torches Barrick could see the southerners’ eyes widen in terror as Hammerfoot bellowed even louder and thundered toward them, Chastiser spinning above his head. Every single one of the Xixians lifted their shields, but that did those who were in front of Hammerfoot no good: the gigantic ax fell with a swift, savage crunch. The shrieking of those crushed beneath the weapon and their own crumpled shields was horrible to hear.

The Xixians a little farther back escaped the giant’s first onslaught but were caught with their shields up as the drows running behind Hammerfoot quickly reached them and began ripping at the soldiers’ legs and feet with the hooks on the base of their short spears, tumbling dozens of the dark, bearded men to the gravel track.

Then the Ettin bellowed a word the drows seemed to recognize. The little men dropped to the stone; Hammerfoot snatched up Barrick, then turned and threw himself to the floor as well. A moment later a swarm of arrows snapped out of the Qar ranks and feathered the first row of Xixian soldiers. The wounded and dying sagged back and tangled the men behind them.

Barrick dimly heard Saqri’s voice, although he could not say whether in his ears or in his head, since the battle was already casting a thousand shadows in his mind, and it was all he could do simply to understand what he saw before him.

Saqri’s deadliest hand-to-hand fighters, Tricksters and Changing People, now leaped out. Within moments they were in among the Xixians and drawing blood with blade and talon so quickly that armored, bearded men appeared to fall untouched to their red-soaked knees, worshiping swift shadows. But the autarch’s soldiers were no cowards—these men had fought many enemies, if not any stranger ones—and within moments had begun to recover from the initial surprise and retaliate. A few clashing, shouting knots began to form in the chaos, and in places the Qar were being pushed back. When somebody fell against a wall and knocked down a torch, it was quickly stamped into sparks and the hallway became even darker.

Like hired fighters performing in the halls of Kernios, he thought wildly.

Earth Lord, the voices sang to him. We are in the Earth Lord’s house. His vengeance will be terrible—if we fail, we lose more than our lives… !

We fought him and his brothers on Silvergleam’s walls cried others, flung this way and that in Barrick’s thoughts like leaves in a gale. Do not catch Death’s cold eye! Do not let him freeze your heart as he did Lord Silvergleam’s…

For Whitefire! For the Children of Breeze!

No. Find yourself, said Ynnir’s voice, closer than the rest. Find yourself only. Let the rest go.

Barrick grabbed at the elusive thought, struggled to push the rest away.

Find yourself.

And suddenly, like a child learning the trick of walking for the first time, Barrick reached out toward himself and stepped out of the noise. What was happening was still all around him, but it slowed and grew more and more insubstantial until it seemed no more distracting than a pleasant breeze.

You are needed.

And suddenly he could see everything, clear as the finest glass, like something Chaven had ground for himself, and time lurched forward again, pulling Barrick as though with a string. A short distance away across the broad, dark space he could see Saqri’s red stone glowing, bouncing like a floating spark as she faced a half dozen Xixian soldiers. Six foes, but a hundred queens, a hundred ancestors, were in her, Barrick could feel it. He could sense her hot furies and cold joys as she fought, could even perceive a little of the chorus of battle-queens of which Saqri herself was only a part, a music of thought so complicated and bizarre that he could barely hear it, let alone understand it, even though it filled his head.

“Whitefire!” It came to his thoughts and his lips at the same moment—Whitefire the sun god, the brother of doomed Silvergleam. And Whitefire, the god’s sword, carried so long by Yasammez in the defense of the People. It felt right. “Whitefire!” Barrick shouted again, and suddenly saw—no, not just saw, but for a moment truly lived—that god’s last doomed charge against the monsters who had killed his brother Silvergleam, his hated rivals and stepbrothers, the Children of Moisture. Barrick hurried forward and the battle surrounded him like roaring water. All the battles surrounded him. A song of war that was many songs and many sounds filled his head, so many voices singing it that he could no longer tell which thoughts were his own, though that did not matter to him. Like a salmon breasting the crash of the river, Barrick Eddon swam into the dark and the blood and all the sounds of death run wild in a small place.

Briony thought she had plumbed the depths of surprise during this year of impossible strangeness, but she had not expected to wake up to find a man smaller than the stub of last night’s candle standing beside her head. She gasped and sat up. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the tiny man was no dream.

“I am searching the leader of this lot,” he called up to her. “I carry important news for un.” He bowed to her. “Beetledown the Bowman am I. Beest tha the princess Briony, good Olin’s daughter?”

A hundred different responses came to her lips, but what came out at last was a startled giggle. “Merciful Zoria,” she said. “I am. What are you?”

“Telled tha oncet already.” She could see his little face frown in irritation, then suddenly go wide-eyed. “Oh, beg pardon, Majestic Highness! Forgive us our rough scout’s manner.”

Briony really didn’t think she could still be sleeping, but couldn’t help wondering whether she might have lost her wits somewhere. “You said you’re… Beetledown?” She shook her head. “But what are you, Beetledown?” The first light of dawn was creeping past the flap of her tent. She could hear men moving outside, the sound of the day beginning, and could smell the fires that had only recently been lit. In the midst of everything else the smell of burning wood made her stomach twitch with hunger.

“I’ll take you to Prince Eneas,” she said at last. “These are his men. But I’d better carry you.” She stared at him. “How did you get here? Did you simply… drop out of the sky?”

His smile was no bigger than an eyelash, but still quite charming. “After a manner of saying… yes, mum. I came as a courier. My feathersteed waits on a branch.”

“Your what where? Feathersteed… ?”

He looked at her in surprise. “My bird, Your Heightsome Majesty.” He was worried now that she might be making fun of him. “I prefer to fly a flittermouse, in truth, but with the sun up, I left ’em to their sleep and came by pigeon.”

“I can promise no more,” the tiny man told Prince Eneas and his captains. Beetledown was doing his best to stand still in the platform of Briony’s outstretched hand, but every time he shifted his balance it made her palm tickle. “Just that my queen and the queen of the Fay both say to you and your soldiers that if you come to look on the autarch’s camp you might see something that will interest you. They advise to come in force.”

“Might see something?” Lord Helkis looked at the little man with disgust and something that might have been fear. “Are we so foolish that we are meant to fall for a trap like this? Simply march out to be destroyed on the word of some magical creatures out of a story? This… roof rat?”

“Rooftopper,” said Beetledown with affronted dignity. “Your kind know my kind well enough, tall man—used to put out bowls of milk and pieces of bread for us, to ask our favor and blessings on the house.”

“The night-elves of your nurse’s stories have come to visit us, Miron!” The prince was laughing, but more at his angry lieutenant than at the tiny messenger. “Perhaps you should look to your shoes to see if any of them need mending.”

But Lord Helkis was not to be so easily convinced. “Do you not understand, Highness? These are Blue Caps. Speak of the old tales? They are creatures of the twilight, the shadows. We cannot trust them.”

“If you remember,” Briony pointed out, “that is who this small gentlemen and his friends are fighting. Would we make the same mistake again, attacking allies and helping enemies?”

The tiny man looked puzzled by this. Briony quietly explained what had happened.

“Those must have been Akutrir’s lot,” he told her. “Lady Porcupine sent them out, but they had not returned when I left,” he said. “We did not know you had found each other.”

Eneas scowled; he had heard. “We shall speak more of that shame later. For now, we must hear all of what your mistress has to say. Queen Saqri, is it? Is she the one who has terrified the north—the dark lady?”

Beetledown shook his head. “Nay, but un’s that Lady Porcupine’s daughter—or granddaughter… I am not certain. But dark lady has stepped down and Saqri commands the Qar now, and says that if tha hurry toward the mainland city of Southmarch on the bay shore tha might see something of interest.” He turned toward Briony. “You, too, Princess, although the queen didn’t speak or send ’ee any message. By the Peak, tha and thy family have been away a long time!”

She nodded. “We have.”

“What else can you tell us?” demanded Eneas. “What exactly will we find on the shore of Brenn’s Bay, besides a vast camp of Xixian soldiers?”

Beetledown moved a little, trying to keep his balance on Briony’s unsteady hand. “I do not know for my personal self, Prince. I tell ’ee only what was given to me to tell—I know nought else. But Queen Saqri sent this message knowing tha wert here when none of the rest of us knew, so I think tha would do well to listen.”

Lord Helkis snorted. “A mannekin no bigger than a whisker bids us trust his fairy-mistress. How could that possibly have an unhappy ending?”

“Your mockery is duly noted, Helkis.” Eneas frowned at him. “It does not help me decide what to do next.”

“Ah, tha minds me of another part of my message,” said little Beetledown. “Tha should be on top of the hills above the bay by sundown.”

It was only after Barrick had defended himself through a dozen struggles and bloodied his sword several times—first on a fallen Xixian who tried to stab him from the ground, next on another southern soldier surprised to have missed his spear thrust, who did not get a chance to thrust again—that he tumbled out of his exalted state and began to feel like an ordinary mortal prince again. The Qar were now pushing back the autarch’s men without much resistance, so he let the battle eddy past him while he leaned against the wall and tried to get air back into his burning lungs. Every muscle in his body throbbed. He remembered every moment of what had happened, but at the same time it seemed so distant that it might have happened to someone else.

Even when I can subdue them, the Fireflower voices are too strong for me to silence for long. But Ynnir’s words had given him an idea, a first taste of how it might feel to harness the Fireflower like a battle charger and put all that strength to work.

What can I become, he wondered. What will I become? I understand the speech of the fairies, he thought. My crippled arm is healed. There is nothing of the old Barrick left. It has all been burned clean away.

If Hammerfoot was protecting him, it was in a very distant sort of way. The jut-browed giant was currently somewhere in the middle of the autarch’s men, roaring as he used a soldier from the Sanian hills as a club until he could pick up his ax again, which had become stuck in the shattered carcass of a supply wagon. Barrick’s safety did not appear to be uppermost in his mind.

Barrick reached again for the trick of thought that would allow him to muffle the voices and dim the shadows that the Fireflower made in his thoughts—a trick like squinting inside his own head. It was hard to hold it, easy to be distracted, and he knew it would avail him nothing if he were pushed to his limits.

Let it move through you, Ynnir’s quiet voice told him. You cannot make it happen. You cannot make it anything. It is.

The Xixians were fighting desperately now, retreating back up the wide tunnel but grudging every step, and even without the benefit of a hundred Qar kings and warriors Barrick would have known why. Many thousand of the autarch’s men were camped just above. These troops had undoubtedly sent messengers for reinforcements already. But didn’t these fools wonder why? Did they not question why the Qar would attack such a large army and in such a strange way—from beneath?

Perhaps this autarch is too used to having his own way. Or perhaps he has simply underestimated the People.

A huge, one-eyed man with a beard crashed through the Qar just in front of Barrick. The attacker thrust a spear all the way through a slender, pale-skinned Qar warrior so that the creature dangled like a broken puppet, then knocked aside two more with his hide-covered shield before immediately turning on Barrick, who tangled his sword with one of the other Qar’s blades and lost it as he tried to spin out of the way. The one-eyed man’s spear snapped out and missed Barrick’s gut only by the width of a finger or two. The tip scratched its way up the chestplate before slipping past his helmet. Barrick brought his shield up in time to repel a second thrust, but the Xixian giant swung his own shield, big and heavy as a door, and knocked Barrick onto his back.

The Xixian giant grinned as he stood over him, showing teeth and also the places teeth were not. He kicked Barrick’s shield out of the way, almost wrenching his arm out of its socket, then lifted his spear up over Barrick’s chest.

Things changed so abruptly that for a moment Barrick couldn’t tell what was different. Only when blood fountained out of the ruin of the man’s neck and splashed down onto him did Barrick realize that the giant’s head was gone. Someone had cut it off—no, knocked it off and sent it flying as a child might decapitate a daisy with a stick.

“Time to get up, young master,” growled Hammerfoot. “You will miss seeing the Elementals at work, otherwise.” The massive lower lip jutted like a granite cliff as he looked Barrick up and down where he lay. “You are covered with blood. Well done.”

“Most of it just sprayed on me when you took his head off.” Barrick got up slowly, aching as though he had fallen down two flights of stairs. “But I thank you.”

Hammerfoot nodded and licked at the red smeared on his fingers. His eyes glinted deep in the black pits on either side of his flat nose. “It was my pleasure.”

Briony could not fail to be impressed. All of the Syannese nobles had been given a chance to speak their hearts. Many had felt it was too soon to be going anywhere near the autarch’s legions, that it must almost certainly be a trap, however bizarre its methods. Then, when they all had finished, Eneas gave his decision; they would ride. After that they had readied themselves for battle as calmly as if they had not argued against it.

“Nothing can be harmed by listening,” her father had always said, and here was proof: the prince’s soldiers, especially the sons of proud old Syannese families, wished to be heard. Briony decided there was nothing for a good king (or queen) to fear in letting their subjects speak and even object to the ruler’s desire as long as they would join in wholeheartedly afterward, as the Temple Dogs were doing despite not winning the point. Briony sometimes felt that despite all the wisdom her father had shared with her, she had learned more about governing people in the days since she had left Southmarch Castle than in all the years she had lived as a princess of the ruling family.

The sun was just past noon and they were already high up into the coastal hills, making good time. The day was warm and dry, the dust rising around the horses’ hooves, and the larks were singing. It seemed unthinkable to Briony that so fair a world could have so much dread in it.

“Tomorrow is Midsummer’s Eve,” she told Eneas as they watered the horses. “My father said the autarch planned to raise a god. What do you think he meant? What will happen two days from now? The autarch must believe in it, at least. He hasn’t even conquered Hierosol, yet he left his siege and sailed all this way.”

Eneas was listening to her, but he was also watching every rider who went by, every foot soldier. The prince of Syan had been born to command men, she decided, in a way her father had not been, for all his virtues. Some things about the task of leadership had always filled Olin with dismay or sadness. Kendrick had often teased that, “Father is too kind to be king. He should be in a cave out in the Kracian hills with the other hermits and oracles.” Barrick had never thought this was funny, though the idea had sent Briony and Kendrick into gales of laughter, but only now did she understand why. How could that man I spoke to in the dark be the same monster Barrick hates and fears? How was it that after all the years of kindness their father had shown him, her twin only remembered his moments of cruelty, his madness… ?

“I cannot tell you what the autarch thinks,” said Eneas, breaking her reverie. “But I am afraid.”

At first she thought she hadn’t heard him correctly. “You are what, Highness?”

“I fear the Autarch of Xis as I fear no other man—as I fear nothing but the ultimate judgment of Heaven.” He solemnly made the sign of the Three. “I have fought against him, you remember—or at least his men—and I have heard of his deeds all these last two years as the flotsam of the armies that tried to stand against him landed on the shores of Eion. He is mad as a wounded snake but as clever as Kupilas himself, and has an entire terrified and terrifying empire struggling to fulfill his every whim.” He still watched his men file past, but now his handsome face was troubled. “But what are his whims? No one can say, Briony. We can only guess, and wait, and… and fear.”

Before she could think of anything to say, Lord Helkis came racing toward them down the forested slope, swinging his charger back and forth between the trees, clearly bearing some kind of important news.

“My good Miron, is all well?” Eneas asked. “No, do not bow, speak to me! Why such haste?”

“Highness, you must come. The forward scouts are calling that the camp is under attack!”

“What camp?” demanded the prince even as Briony’s heart leaped into a swifter rhythm.

“The Xixian camp, Highness. The autarch’s men! They’re under attack!”

“By whom? From where?”

“Come and talk to Weasel and the other scouts,” Helkis urged.

Eneas was already clambering into his saddle, not even waiting for help from his groom, as though his coat of chain armor were no more substantial than linen. Briony realized she was staring and hastened to get back into the saddle herself; unlike the prince, she was grateful for the groom who sprang to aid her. “The scouts can talk as we ride,” Eneas declared as he pulled on his helmet. “I wish to see this for myself!”

They found a place where they could see down past the last curve of the foothills to the vast Xixian encampment sprawling beside the bay and throughout the city itself, the round tents seeming as numerous as grains of sand. The autarch’s men were fighting, that was clear, but with whom seemed considerably less so. After staring through it himself for a few moments, Eneas passed his silver spyglass to Briony. She had to push and pull at the tube for a moment, then suddenly, as if she had flown down upon the scene as swiftly as a hawk, she could clearly see the camp and the fighting.

“Zoria’s mercy—some of those are giants!” It was like a dream, seeing what happened so clearly but soundlessly. “That one—I swear it is a monster! Is it some devilry of the autarch that has rebounded on him?”

“I think those are Qar,” said Eneas. “We know the fairy folk were here at Southmarch. Those who attacked the merchant wagons had to come from somewhere.”

“But where? I thought they had retreated.” Briony could make no sense of this unexpected fairy army, their shields and armor a hundred different colors, their shapes almost as varied. She swung the glass toward the place where the fighting was thickest, along the edge of the camp nearest the rocky hills that came down almost to the shore of Brenn’s Bay. “They’re coming out of the rocks,” she announced. “No, out of the caves! The fairies are coming out of the caves and they’re trying to get into the autarch’s camp. Some of them have, but most of them can’t get past the fighting along the wall.” She winced and handed the spyglass back to Eneas. “The fighting is terrible. They are dying by scores at the wall of the camp.”

The prince had a strange look in his eyes, a gleam she had not seen before. “Then let us try to give them a moment’s help. I suppose it is pointless to ask you to stay behind?”

She laughed despite sudden, breath-stealing fear and nodded her head vigorously because it was taking her a moment to speak. “Pointless!”

Eneas frowned. “So be it. Come, then, and may the gods watch over us all. We chose the wrong side once. Not again!”

At the prince’s signal the horns called the assembly. The Temple Dogs who had dismounted scrambled back into their saddles; those who were drinking took a last swallow and wiped their mouths. The horses stamped and capered as Eneas stood in his stirrups.

“Anglin came to save my ancestors!” he shouted, holding his sword high. “Now we will pay back a little of that blood debt! Drive these southern dogs into the sea!” He waved and spurred his horse along the crest, following the scouts down the hill toward the camp. “For Syan and Southmarch!” he cried. “For King Enander and King Olin!”

All Briony had time for was the briefest of prayers…

Kind Zoria, bring us through this danger safely…

… And then she was riding too; they were all riding, plunging down the dry hills with a noise like summer thunder.

The Xixians had been arrogant, Barrick decided: they had not truly expected an attack, and certainly not out of the very depths where the autarch had been using his own huge army like a hammer, pounding away on his outnumbered enemies. His generals had made mistakes and they had also been profligate with the blood of their soldiers, confident they had the numbers to shrug off most mistakes… and they were right. The Xixians were fierce, stubborn foes who still had the fairies grossly outnumbered. The Qar had not reached the surface in their initial surge, and now it was beginning to look like they might never reach it.

Saqri’s troops had managed to break through the first wall of Naked infantry—spearmen with shields, their sheer numbers and weight meant to force the Qar backward—and had also managed to destroy two of the autarch’s war-fire wagons before they could be used against them: even now the wreckage burned so hot that no one could come within a dozen yards.

A pitched battle up the slope had followed, which finally gave the Trickster archers a chance to work, and Xixian bodies were soon tumbling from the heights. When the Qar reached the top of the passage at last they slowly fought their way up the ramps that spiraled around the high-ceilinged rock chamber, then up onto the rocky beach. A cannonball exploded near them and killed three of the Ettins and a score of smaller Qar. The autarch’s men had not been as stupid as Barrick had first thought. Instead of assuming they would hold the smaller Qar force in the tunnels, the Xixians had brought up reinforcements… and more: they had killed several of their own horses in the hurry, but had succeeded in turning around one of their own half-cannons. The first cannonball had missed the fairies but had dug a huge hole into the hillside; they were loading now to fire again.

A squadron of Xixian archers hurried down the beach to help defend the camp, still buckling on their gear and stopping to pull strings onto their bows: others were firing arrows of their own even as they ran toward the massive cannon, clearly intent on setting up a new main line of defense. The Tricksters clambered up into the rocks beside the cave mouth, trying to reach a vantage point where they did not have to shoot past their own allies.

Barrick, for the moment in the relative safety of Hammerfoot’s massive shadow, could only stare helplessly out at this scene of madness. We will be trapped here in the caves, he thought. Then, if the autarch sends troops back out of the tunnels, we will be caught and broken like a walnut in a blacksmith’s tongs.

Another thunderous blast and a cannonball struck beside the mouth of the cavern, sending large stones bouncing away in all directions. As the echoes died away, Saqri inclined her head and a squadron of Changing tribe warriors rushed out of the cave mouth, shrilling a war cry, their bodies dropping to all fours and blurring into metamorphosis even as they raced across the uneven, rocky hillside down toward the cannoneers. Some of the Xixian archers simply turned and fled from this horrifying sight, but the swiftest of the Changing tribe veered aside from the main emplacement and quickly caught up to them, singing as they shed mortal blood again.

Xixian arrows flew toward them from all directions. Three of the Changing tribe fell like dropped grain sacks, and another beast-man arched his back and stumbled with a shriek of agony—a cry like something wild having its heart ripped out that made Barrick flinch badly, though he was nowhere close.

Suddenly the world broke apart around him, or seemed to, as if it had been smashed like a plate thrown against the hearth. Barrick’s ears seemed to have been pierced by white-hot needles; when he could think again he could hear nothing but a high-pitched hum and the faint murmur of Hammerfoot. The giant crouched only a short distance away, but to Barrick’s ears the creature’s powerful voice seemed as small as a mouse’s, scarcely to be heard above the thumping of the cannons.

Hammerfoot brushed dirt and chips of stone from his skin. “Earth’s blood—the Xixy-men are bringing up two more of their cursed guns.” The Deep Ettin seemed more annoyed by this than fearful. “They will just keep setting sparks to them until they smash us into powder.…”

Another huge thump of sound and the cavern shook again, hard. Debris rained down from the ceiling, and rocks rattled harshly on Barrick’s helmet as though a bullying hand smacked him over and over. Dizzy, spitting blood and wet dust, he shoved himself back against the cavern wall and watched the last stones patter down onto the ground in front of him. He was frightened but not much surprised by this world of ringing silence. Every song the People sang was about defeat and honorable death; now they had earned what they sought, what they believed in. And whether he was one of them or not, he seemed to have earned the same thing.

The world convulsed again. This time, darkness followed.

In all the years that her father and Shaso had talked about it, in all the courtly tales she had read about of bravery and daring, nothing had prepared Briony Eddon for the truth of war. All was chaos—shouting, flying arrows, blood splashing like water—and if both armies had been human, there would have been no way to pick out friend from foe. As it was, even before she struck a blow, Briony was already struggling to remember that the creatures who appeared to be the stuff of nightmares were her allies, or at least were fighting against the same enemy, the warriors of Xis. Things that crouched and snarled like apes or bears but wore armor, others that leaped like insects, crossing a dozen yards in a single bound to strike with slender, needle-sharp spears, some creatures wrapped so thoroughly in flapping, dark cloth that she could see nothing of them but a glint like fire where their faces should be—it was as though the painted margins of Father Timoid’s ancient prayer books had come to life, spilling demons and monstrosities out into the air of the world.

The Temple Dogs’ initial charge had cut deep into the Xixians as they rushed to keep the rest of the invading Qar trapped in the cave just south of the camp. Shortly, though, their resistance had stiffened and now Briony could see that Eneas’ troops would have to fight their way back out of a crowd of southerners, who surrounded them almost completely. More Xixians were on their way as well, fumbling themselves into their battle gear as they hurried to the fight. Three of the Xixian cannons had now been turned away from the walls of Southmarch and trained instead on the cavern entrance where the Qar had emerged. The big guns boomed and spat fire, each shot smashing more of the base of the hill around that cavern entrance into rubble and smoke and dust.

At the moment, Briony was in comparatively less danger, as long as she kept her head down—in the center of Eneas’ men, surrounded on all sides by able riders who had fallen back into close formation and with their spears and shields were contesting the Xixians, who were mostly on foot. Only Eneas and a few others at the outer edge of the fighting had discarded spears in favor of their swords or axes. Briony watched Eneas defeat two foot soldiers in a matter of moments, using his shield to deflect the spear thrust of one before staving in the man’s helmet with a sword blow, then stabbing the second in his gorge. As the man fell, blood already sheeting onto his chest, Briony had to look away—not because of the Xixian, but because watching Eneas risking his life was almost as painful as finding her father and being helpless to free him.

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…

24. Disobedient Soldiers

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 ...

Anissa. He had almost forgotten about her. Tolly had been manipulating her for quite some time, long before Tinwright himself had become the lord protector’s unwilling servant. Anissa, who had married the king and had given birth to King Olin’s last ...

“... Child?” Tinwright had been frightened before, but now he felt sickened as well. “You ... you don’t mean the child, do you? Anissa’s child?”

Tolly nodded. “Young Alessandros, indeed. He is exactly what I need. Take soldiers and fetch him to me. Do not harm Anissa, though—I may still have some need of her.” He stood looking out the window again, staring down at the lights of campfires.

Tinwright wanted it not to be true; he wanted to have misunderstood. “You want me to steal the queen’s baby—the king’s son?”

“If you are too craven just to take it, you may tell Anissa whatever you like,” said Tolly, waving his hand as if stealing a woman’s only child was an everyday sort of task. “Tell her that I mean to have the priests give him a special blessing or something like that. No, then she will wish to come along. I don’t care, poet—time is short! Just bring the child back to me here. Take two guards along. Three of you should be able to deal with a single small Devonisian woman. Now go, curse you. Make haste!”

Child stealer. Tinwright stumbled out of the protector’s chamber, wondering how he had been consigned to the darkest, cruelest pits of the afterlife without ever noticing his own death.

Ash Nitre’s apprentice looked as though he didn’t quite believe Chert. “Are you certain you only want two donkeys?”

“Just enough to pull the cart, yes.” Chert nodded toward the line of waiting men, mostly stonecutters now too old for daily work but willing to do what they could to save Funderling Town. He wondered what they would say if they knew what he planned, but he also knew he could not afford to tell them until they were well away from the temple, on the site, isolated from the temptation to let a word or two slip. “The rest will be carried on foot. We’ve got narrow paths ahead of us. We may have to lift the donkeys over in a few places!”

“Problems enough of my own,” the apprentice said. “Cinnabar and the rest of those unbraced Guildsmen now expect us to make five more barrels a day—five!”

Here, in this quiet part of the sheltering earth, it was doubtless hard to remember sometimes what was going on only a short distance away. Still, Chert thought, Nitre and his helpers might benefit by leaving their blasting-powder mill for a day and visiting the far end of the temple estate, where the healers were hard at work all hours of the day and even the men who had not suffered badly in the fighting had faces that looked as though they came from poorly made dolls, their eyes staring blank as buttons.

“It is a war, you know,” was all Chert said.

“Oh, the Elders know I know that. Even after we go to all the work of making it, we still have to lower it down five hundred ells of rope. Do you know how long it takes to splice that much rope together well?” The apprentice shook his head. “I know it’s a war. It had better be a war, to wear me out like this.”

Flint, back today after another of his mysterious disappearances had driven Opal almost to distraction, clambered up onto the narrow seat of the wagon. Chert made certain the sacks of different ingredients were all tied before flapping the reins against the donkey’s hindquarters to start the procession. He knew enough about the making of blasting powder now that he wasn’t worried the saltpeter might catch fire and burst and kill them if it fell. Instead, he was worrying about what would happen if he had an accident on one of the steeper tracks and lost one of the large sacks completely, or—Elders forbid it!—the entire load. They had very little of anything to waste.

It was madness, of course, Chert knew. The whole idea was mad. Even if it worked correctly it might kill them all ... but there was very little chance it would work correctly.

A worker walking in front of the cart slowed as others slowed before him, then at last had to set his barrow down. Chert pulled back on the reins while the road ahead was cleared of some minor blockage. He worried that he might have exaggerated the chances of success of this venture to Captain Vansen and the others.

“Papa Chert?”

He started. As was often the case, Flint had been silent so long he had forgotten he was there. “What, lad?”

The boy frowned as if trying to find the words to put across some particularly difficult notion. “I don’t feel well.”

“What’s wrong? Is it your middle? Are you hungry?”

Flint shook his pale head. As always, he was as solemn as a Metamorphic Brother at prayer. “No. I feel strange. Something is starting up. Coming awake.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “No. Not coming awake. Still asleep ... but coming closer.” He wrapped his slender arms around his chest as though suddenly cold. “It gets stronger. In my sleep every night I hear the singing. It’s my fault. That’s what it says. It’s my fault and it’s going to get out.”

Chert opened his mouth and then shut it. He knew that what he had been about to say, whatever it might have been—Don’t worry, lad, all will be well, or They’re just bad dreams—would have been a lie. And one thing about Flint was, it didn’t do any good to lie to him. He always seemed to know. Since the moment he had entered their lives, since the moment Opal had fed him and he had attached himself to them like a stray cat, Chert had always felt that the boy knew more than Chert did himself. And, often enough to be disturbing, Flint had proved that it was true.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked instead.

Flint looked up at him, and there was enough of the frightened child in him still, of a true frightened innocent, that Chert’s heart felt as though it would break in his breast. “I don’t know,” the boy said quietly. “I don’t think so. But sometimes I feel that I shouldn’t be here—that I should go away. Far away.”

“You can’t do that, lad. Your mother would throw a strut and dump a load wall. No, if you’re really worried about things then you should stay close to her. There’s nothing on this earth, whether goblin or southron, that wouldn’t be scared of Opal.”

Flint actually smiled, a tiny, shy twitch of the lips that Chert had seen only twice or thrice all told. “You always say that, but you’re not really afraid of her.”

“Oh, but I am, lad. That woman is a terror, and I am more frightened than you can guess.”

Flint looked at him closely, not certain whether he was joking or not. Chert wasn’t quite certain, either. “Frightened of what?”

“That I’ll disappoint her. That I’ll let her down. That she’ll finally decide she shouldn’t have married me—that she should have accepted my brother’s offer, instead. Oh, he fancied her, your uncle Nodule did. But she thought he was a blockhead.” He laughed. “Blockhead—that’s what she said! A wise woman, your mother.”

He found Opal, Vermilion Cinnabar, and the rest of the women sitting in the deserted courtyard of what had once been the old way station between the Great Delve and the temple, talking and enjoying the cool, moist air. The way station was not only near the place Chert had chosen for his undertaking, but the air came down to it from vents above sea level, so it was always a bit cooler than the rest of the temple’s lands. That was one of the reasons they had chosen it as a spot to mix gunflour: even mill dust could burn and explode if the weather was too hot and dry, so how much more dangerous would the mixture they were making be?

Opal and Vermilion had explained to the others most of what was to be done, the need for careful separation of the saltpeter from the other sands (it would be added at the last moment) and crafting the blasting powder into little balls the size of peppercorns, which according to Nitre made it burn hotter, faster, and more evenly.

“We will come only two times a day to carry back the blasting powder you ladies have made,” Chert explained. “That way we can apply ourselves to our own tasks and you can do yours without too much interference.”

“Too much interference from men, you mean,” said Pebble Jasper, Wardthane Sledge’s wife, who had her husband’s delicate touch with a joke. “Men trying to interfere with us women, is what I mean.”

“Since when do you run away from that?” another called. “We’ve heard you down on Gem Street, mooing like a lost cow outside the guildhall—‘Sledge! Sledger, my beauty! Come home to your Dolly! I’m a-lonely!’”

Several of the women laughed so loud Chert thought they’d hurt themselves. He felt a bit awkward to have the boy hearing this, although of the two of them, only Chert was blushing. “Enough, good ladies. We all need to get to our work. Opal, a moment?”

She looked well—good color, as though she had been out in the upground sun. It was clear she had been working hard as well as talking and laughing. “So you’re off, are you?” she asked.

“Have to, my old darling. We’ll be back by suppertime to see how you ladies are doing and take away what you’ve made so far. Did Nitre show you all the tricks?”

“It’s not a lot different from making a stew,” she said dismissively. “We’ve got it written down—Vermilion writes a beautiful hand. Like something you’d see here in the temple, in a book.” Her frown of preoccupation abruptly softened and she looked straight into his eyes. “Oh, my old man, you are so full of mad ideas! Do you really mean to bring down so much stone with this blasting powder? What if the whole world caves in? You frighten me, sometimes. You always have.”

“What does that mean?” He had to admit it was mildly pleasing to be thought of as full of mad ideas. Certainly it was better than being Magister Nodule Blue Quartz’s less-successful brother.

She looked around as if others might be listening in, but the women were busy overseeing Chert’s men as they unloaded the various powders from the cart and their barrows, making certain each was delivered to its proper place and taking the opportunity to show off the innovations they had thought of, which of course set the men to arguing with them.

“You are my husband,” she said, so quietly it might have been a secret. “I love you dearly, old fool, whatever you have got us into in the past—and I do not even wish to think what you might have done to us this time.” She laughed, but her eyes blinked, and Chert realized to his surprise that they were full of tears. “You remember that as you dash about with your ... strategies and wars.” She made them both sound like play-things for errant boys. “Come back to me safe. I demand it of you. Do you promise?”

He looked at her face, her adored, familiar old face. “I do—at least I will do my best ...”

“No. Promise.” She had his hands tightly. “Don’t go without saying it. Say you’ll come back safe.”

He looked at her, felt once more what he had felt other times—that she wanted something important from him, but he could not understand what it was and she could not tell him. “I promise,” he said at last. “I’ll come home safe.”

“Good.” She let go of his hand and swiped her sleeve roughly across her eyes. “Go on then. We’ll be fine. We’re Funderling women—we’ll get the job done.”

“I know.” He leaned in and kissed her on the lips. “The boy should stay here with you. I do not want to have to keep an eye on him out where I’ll be. Too many cross-passages, too many places to fall.”

She nodded. “Fine. Go on, before I start blubbing again.”

Lightened of its load of blast powder makings, the cart bounced over every stone as they wound along toward the Stormstone Roads, and Chert bounced with it. He reflected that it would probably be more comfortable to be walking and pushing an empty barrow like the others, but somebody had to make certain the donkeys didn’t roll the cart into a pit.

Where are the others now? he worried. Vansen, Cinnabar, all of them—are they still alive? Fighting for their lives down there? His hours in the Maze and beside the Sea in the Depths were never far from his memory, a foreboding he could not shake off, like a terrifying dream. How will I even know if they want me to go through with the plan? I suppose I could send down a message with Nitre’s gunflour, wait for them to send one back up the same way.

But what if they didn’t reply? What if they couldn’t? Who would make the decision then? Chert could not imagine making it himself. Chasing his adopted son through the Mysteries had been bad enough, but this was a responsibility that might horrify the Earth Elders themselves.

Ferras Vansen could no longer even guess at what day it was. Time itself had been smeared into a succession of hours with very little difference between them. They might have as many as three days before Midsummer’s Eve, but Vansen had no precise idea and was far too busy fighting for his life to find out.

The Metamorphic Brothers’ temple was only a distant memory now, far behind them and far above them: the autarch’s superior force had driven them downward along the twisting passages between Five Arches and the Cavern of Winds, then out of that vast cavern and all the way down to the beginning of the dark Maze, the place where the Funderlings took their initiates.

Vansen’s troops had slowed the autarch’s progress considerably, but they continued to pay a high price for their resistance: the Funderlings had numbered less than two thousand at their greatest strength, when they had first entered the tunnels near Five Arches, but now they were less than a thousand and had stacked their dead three and four deep in the side tunnels as they gave ground—too many bodies to give any of them more than a cursory death-blessing before leaving them behind.

It was the grimmest struggle Vansen had ever seen, his undersized defenders hungry, exhausted, slippery with sweat, and forced to fight for hours beside the unburied bodies of their friends and kin. But what made it worst of all was the knowledge that their ending was already assured. This defense, however heroic, could only end in death for all of them, and what followed might even be worse for the survivors they would leave behind—their families and their neighbors.

Exhausted though he was, Ferras Vansen was finding it nearly impossible to sleep. The war was always on his mind, and he stayed awake long past his comrades trying to puzzle out impossible chances because he already knew that none of the possible chances would allow them to survive. When he did manage to fall into a shallow, uneasy slumber, he would be startled awake again by the feeling that all the stones in the world were tumbling down on top of him.

He was near the bottom, and the bottom was growing closer by the hour.

“Gods, but your men have fought well, Magister,” he told Cinnabar. “I do not mean to sound surprised—I expected no less—but I am even more impressed by their bravery since you have no tradition of war.”

“War isn’t the only forge of bravery.” Cinnabar reached over and ran his hand through his son’s hair, but the boy didn’t look up. Young Calomel had been kept out of the worst of the fighting but had still seen more than any child his age should have to see. He had gone from being the mascot and delight of the makeshift army to only another silent, weary, terrified young Funderling whose stare made Vansen’s heart ache. “But make no mistake, Vansen, we Funderlings were warriors once upon a time.”

“I have never heard it.”

“Then you have never studied the history of Eion, sir.” Cinnabar spoke sharply, but Vansen thought it was more from fatigue than any real animosity. “We fought in the greatest war of all, just to name one—against our own kin, the Qar.”

“The Godwar?”

“Yes, but we fought in the wars of men, too. We were miners and sappers in all the great empires, Hierosol and the Kracian States and Syan and even here, in Anglin’s day. Who do you think secured these caverns again after the Qar invaded? That was Funderling work and almost as bloody as this. Say what you will against the Qar but they are fierce, fierce fighters—thousands of our folk died taking these caverns and tunnels back. We called that time the ‘Kinwar,’ and we still have an expression, ‘Lonely as a Kinwar maid,’ because there were so few men to be husbands.” He shook his head sadly. “If our people survive this, there will be far too many widows and unmarried girls again in the years ahead.”

“If only the Qar had stood with us.” That betrayal troubled him far more than any of his own wounds. He had misjudged the Twilight People badly, and now the whole Funderling tribe was paying for Ferras Vansen’s stupidity. “I still can’t believe ...!”

“Don’t torture yourself, Captain.” Sledge Jasper looked up from his whetstone. The Funderling sharpened his knife so frequently that the blade was growing hard to see. “The Earth Elders have a plan for us—no mortal can claim to know as much as the gods.”

“But this time it’s the gods we must fight, or so it seemed from what the Qar told us.”

Cinnabar snorted. “Me, I take nothing the Qar say on trust, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the truth, this southern king, this autarch ... he thinks he can free the gods, and he’s battering his way into our holiest of holies. That’s reason enough to stand our lives on the balance. That you fight alongside us, Captain Vansen, is more than anyone could ask. Don’t waste your strength on regrets.”

Vansen wished it were so easy, that he could command his feelings like soldiers; but that army was far less obedient than these brave Funderlings.

25. Tooth and Bone

He awakened slowly, as if swimming up from Erivor’s pounding depths.

“Why do you hide from the battle, Barrick Eddon?” One of the Trickster Qar grinned down at him like a fox. “There is still much to do.”

“Yes,” said another smiling nightmare. “You should not sleep so late.”

But even as they taunted him, these long-limbed Tricksters—three of them, as far as he could see, in different downy shades of gray or brown and with angular faces like laughing demons out of the Book of the Trigon—had been clearing away the dirt and stones that had engulfed him when the wall of the cave collapsed. He could still hear the sounds of strenuous fighting outside the cavern, but at least the cannons had fallen silent. Barrick wanted very much to get out in the open before they began firing again.

As he staggered to his feet and began to knock the worst of the clumped dirt from his armor, the first Trickster handed him his sword, hilt-first. “Perhaps you would like to go out and stick some other sunlanders with that,” the creature suggested.

“Perhaps I would.” He examined the strong, slim Qar blade, which was scratched and dented in a few places but not too badly damaged. “And since you helped dig me out, perhaps you would like to keep me company while I do so.”

“It would be a pleasure, Barrick Eddon,” said the creature, its gray face shiny as ancient leather. “Oh, yes, we all know your name. I am Longscratch. These are Riddletongue and Blackspine, my quarterling cousins. We came here to kill sunlanders, but if it is now the southern sort we kill instead of your sort ... well, let it be so.”

The Qar had already made clear how they felt about his people; Barrick was undaunted. “Very well, then, you feathered bandits,” he said. “Show me what you can do.”

They dashed out of the cavern. The sun had mostly set, though a bit of it was still spread on the horizon like melted butter, and the sky had begun to show its first stars. It would be full dark soon, which would help the Qar, but even so, what chance could they have against the autarch’s vastly larger force?

Barrick was surprised to see that the cannons facing the hillside had been abandoned, but only when a flight of a dozen or so birds swept past him and the shrill voices of their riders floated to him on the wind did he begin to understand some of what had happened. Birds were swooping down without warning all over the near side of the beach and at the edge of the picket around the Xixian camp, but attacking only southerners. That was because little men were riding on the birds—Queen Upsteeplebat’s Rooftoppers, he realized. Thick leather and Mihanni plate didn’t protect the soldiers’ eyes and throats from the tiny darts the little men were firing at them. All around him, Xixians were running madly, hands clapped over their faces; many more lay unmoving on the sand, a-bristle with miniature arrows.

Barrick looked back to the cavern they had just quitted, but there was no sign of more troops coming. “Where is the queen?” he asked the Tricksters. “Where are the rest of our troops?”

“We are the end of the line,” Longscratch said. “Our army is all in the field.”

The flying Rooftoppers had only managed to drive the nearest Xixians back toward camp, but the attack from the air had given the rest of the Qar a chance to escape the hill caves without being blown to pieces by the autarch’s cannons. But the Xixians were hardened fighters and had discovered that, as astonishing as little men on birds might be, they were not impossible to fight; some of the southerners had grabbed burning brands from their campfires and swung them through the air like rippling banners of flame.

Longscratch and his cousins finished scavenging up loose arrows, stuffing as many as they could find into their quivers, which, other than their arm-shields, seemed the only thing they wore.

“We must find Saqri and the others,” Barrick called. “Follow me!”

He sprinted across the sand and then leaped over the ring-pit the southerners had dug around their camp. Some of the wooden barricade still lay on the ground, smoldering. A great knot of men and horses were caught up in a whirlpool of battle a few hundred paces away along the broken fence. Hundreds more of the autarch’s men were running across the camp to join the struggle, some of them covering their heads with tent cloth against the claws and arrows of the bird-men. The Xixians were clearly beginning to regroup.

Barrick and the three Tricksters reached the rest of the Qar, who were trying to hold their newly won position against an ever-widening force of Xixian soldiers, but every time a southerner fell, another stepped up into his place. The rest of the autarch’s troops, just arriving from the farther parts of the camp, were organizing themselves for a counterattack; in moments they would swoop down and wipe the few hundred Qar away like a storm wind threshing sea foam to oblivion.

Barrick could not pause to think about the worsening odds. The fighting was all around him now, spears leaping out at him like striking serpents, the bearded Xixians yelping and growling like dogs around a midden. His Qar armor was so light he hardly felt as if he was wearing it, but it was becoming cruelly hard work simply to stay alive on the ground, and now even more enemies were rushing toward them, many of them mounted. As if awakened by all this chaos, the Fireflower voices were threatening to overwhelm his thoughts.

Crying Hill, and the Gray Ones advancing ...

Ah! My queen, my sister, take the children and flee...!

Stand and face us, soul-drinker ...

Moments Barrick Eddon had never himself experienced washed over him and he found himself slowing, stunned by so many new ideas. A Xixian spear slipped past his shield and dug into the joint between his sword arm and the shoulder of his armor. He stumbled and almost dropped his blade as a line of fire burned across his skin and sinew. One of the Tricksters—the darkest one, Riddletongue—jumped forward into the breach and caught a second Xixian stab on his arm-shield, little more than a padded tube of bone too large to come from any creature Barrick knew. The Trickster then jabbed at the attacker with his own spear, an ivory-white needle only a few handspans longer than a sword.

Rasha, something in his memories whispered. The tooth.

The Trickster flung his arm up and let another attack scrape off his arm-shield. Omuro-nah, the Fireflower voices murmured. The bone.

Rasha-sha, omuro-nah, rasha-sha, omuro-nah! chanted ghosts from a hundred different battlefields in a hundred different centuries. Tooth and bone, tooth and bone! They had sung it in victory many times, but they had sung it even more frequently as their allies had died beside them and as they themselves had formed the ring in which they would postpone defeat as long as possible.

You will not see us because we hide in the night. You will not feel us until it is too late. You will not defeat us because we will die with our fangs in your throat—tooth and bone, tooth and bone ...!

Barrick scrambled forward to fight beside these anciently familiar yet barely known allies, trying to remember all that Shaso had taught him. Each moment that unfolded was so full of sharp blades and screaming faces that for a while even the singing of the Fireflower rolled off him, as unremarked as a light rain.

He stopped at last to rest, lungs burning, sweat stinging his eyes, dozens of small and large cuts stinging him too. He was amazed by his own strength and stamina; even the Tricksters could not keep up with him.

They woke your blood, a voice sighed in words he could just separate from the din around him.

Ynnir? Speak to me! Dizzily, he looked around. The southerners were giving ground, but Xixian arrows still fell all around him, appearing suddenly and quivering in the churned ground of the city’s bayside commons like some odd crop. They are so many, Lord! What can I do to help Saqri?

You can make haste, the voice told him. Midsummer comes with the morning. If the southern king can keep you here until tomorrow, he has won—he has already nearly reached his prize.

Make haste? How?

Tell my sister-wife that you and the rest of the People have served your purpose here. You must find a way down into the depths before it is too late ... too late ...! The king’s voice, already faint, trailed into silence.

Barrick could not find Saqri. The sun had set behind the hills, but that was not the reason. He could see much better than he should have been able to, so that the night seemed no darker than late afternoon. Catlike, his eyes made use of light he had never noticed before, light which gave edges and colors to things that ordinarily would have been obscure and gray. And his muscles and sinews seemed already to have recovered enough to begin fighting again. It was as though the power and experience of all the kings inside him were plaited like the fibers of a rope, strengthening all that he was, making him a newer, stronger thing.

Godlike. That was the word—there were moments he felt almost godlike. The Fireflower was like molten silver in his veins, strengthening him, filling him with heat and weight. Even with all Shaso’s careful training, he would only have been a crippled boy of sixteen years who would never have survived this fight, but instead he had killed at least half a dozen men and wounded a dozen more, his blade finding its way through the Xixians’ defenses time after time, like a stroke of lightning.

As he hurried toward the nearest fighting, some of the Xixians turned and saw him. They shouted with dismay. Something hot and gleeful rose up in Barrick Eddon’s chest, like hands of fire cupping his heart.

They fear me!

As he reached the edge of the nearest skirmish, he finally saw Saqri and Hammerfoot and the others who had led the way. The queen and her friends were trapped in a swirling melee near the center of the Xixian camp. The moon had crept above the horizon, and its bony gleam was enough for him to see color, detail ... everything. He could even make out the terrified faces of the men Saqri was fighting—or destroying, rather, because if Barrick’s own blade had been like lightning, the queen’s spear was something even swifter and more deadly, perhaps the heavenly thunderbolts that had once flickered around the peak of Mount Xandos itself.

But the Xixians had so many more soldiers that they could bury Saqri and the Ettins in bodies. Cavalrymen from the farther reaches of the embattled camp were now galloping toward the Qar in great numbers, and these newest arrivals, unlike the earliest defenders, were fully armored. Battle standards waved from the backs of their saddles in the colors of half a dozen Xixian companies, horsetails flapping, leather straps jangling with coins.

As Barrick watched, three of the riders split off and headed toward him. Good sense should have made him drop back to the security of the rest of the Qar forces, but something in Barrick was afire and would not let him do the sensible thing.

I’ve been running for years. No more. My banner is my blood—if they want it, let them come take it!

“For Whitefire! For Kupilas!” he shouted, and leaped forward so that he would be better spaced between the approaching riders. Something black flew at him, and he let his momentum carry him onto his side in the dirt as the arrow hissed by. “For Crooked!” he shouted, climbing to his feet again.

Something boomed on the bay behind him, but Barrick had no time to look. The first of the riders was upon him, leaning half out of the saddle and swinging a long, metal-headed club. Barrick took the blow on his shield and managed a cut at the rider’s back, but his own blow only bounced harmlessly from the Xixian’s armor. As the rider wheeled past, Barrick confronted the other two horsemen, both carrying long, small-headed axes. Instead of retreating, he ran forward, forcing them to mistime their swings. He feinted toward one, then shoved his blade into the other Xixian’s chest just below his armpit. The Xixian clung to his saddle and did not fall, but he was shouting in pain and bleeding badly.

More thundering noises, and from the corner of his eye Barrick saw a huge burst of fire and smoke and flying dirt in the midst of the Qar, and bodies spinning through the air. The ships in the harbor! The autarch’s men were firing their deck guns, but in their eagerness to destroy the Qar, they were firing into the mass of their own men as well!

The horsemen who were after Barrick had turned and were coming at him again, slower this time, to take better advantage of having him outnumbered.

Surprise them, the voices urged. A thousand different invisible maps of things he could do came to him, as if he could read every page of a book at the same time. He took a few steps, then suddenly sprinted forward and rolled beneath the middle rider’s swinging mace. He grabbed at the man’s wrist as he passed, something he could never have done with his arm crippled as it had been, then held on, digging his heels into the earth so that the horse’s own force was enough to yank the man out of his saddle. The soldier fell only halfway and dangled with his foot caught in the stirrup, thrashing helplessly until Barrick caught up. He vaulted into the saddle, then turned and hacked away at the screaming man’s trapped ankle until it parted company with his foot and both parts of the Xixian soldier fell to the bloody sand.

As soon as Barrick had his own feet in the stirrups and the horse under his control, he made a point of riding after the wounded man he had already stabbed, not because the noises the man was making bothered him, but because a certain cold implacability was growing in him and he wanted to leave no loose ends, but before Barrick caught him the wounded horseman grabbed at his throat and fell from his horse, pierced by a Qar arrow. The last rider, now confronting a very different kind of fight, abruptly turned and spurred back toward the greater safety of the Xixian ranks at the edge of the camp.

Mounted now, the experience of a dozen kings helping him to calm the Xixian horse, he caught sight of the Tricksters fighting a group of southerners.

“Longscratch, Riddletongue, Blackspine—here!”

As he waited for them, Barrick could see a group of Xixians running away from the fight, but not with the desperate haste of men trying to flee the field of battle: they seemed to be under the control of an officer and were headed toward a large tent near the center of the camp, out between the edge of the city and the bay—the quarters of the autarch himself or some other high-ranking Xixian? Or perhaps something more directly of use in the battle, like one of their huge cannons? Or it might even hold important prisoners. “Hurry!” he shouted at the Qar. “Those Xixies are hiding something. We have to catch them!”

By the time the three Tricksters reached him, the fighting had surrounded him and Barrick was battling for his life again. As he and the Qar fought their way free, Barrick could see that something was happening on the hillside just outside the edge of the city and the camp. A great force of men was riding down out of the heights, singing and shouting. Were they enemies—or unexpected allies? Who could it be? They sounded like northerners! For a moment Barrick could almost believe the Fireflower was showing him some long-buried memory of Coldgray Moor, some vision of men and fairies at war, but it was no ancient Qar battle, it was here and now.

They fought their way out of the worst of the battle. Blackspine found a horse that had lost its rider and clambered into the saddle, soothing the frightened beast with a few whispered, hissing words, then extended a slender arm to help Riddletongue up behind him. Longscratch had found a mount of his own; the previous owner’s severed hand was still tangled in the reins, bouncing against the horse’s shoulder.

“They are hardy, these sunlanders,” said Longscratch with a nod toward the dangling hand, “but the fighting does not have much savor. I liked them better in the old days, when they fought one at a time like proper warriors.”

“And one had time to suck their marrow when they were dead,” added Blackspine wistfully.

Barrick pointed with his bloodied sword. “Look! Those southerners have fallen back to guard that tent. Let’s go have a look at what they don’t want us to see.” He spurred toward it, and the Tricksters followed, laughing and singing wordlessly.

Even as the Xixian horse hit full stride beneath him, its brute strength flowing as smoothly as oil from a flask, something darted past Barrick’s face, passing so close that he ducked down against his stolen mount’s neck. The men guarding the tent had seen them coming and were loosing arrows as fast as they could, but they did not flee. What was it they were willing to give their lives to guard? Barrick’s heart began to pump even faster. Could they truly be so lucky as to have caught the autarch himself on the field?

Several of the guards disappeared into the tent. Barrick and the Tricksters came down on the rest and scattered them. Riddletongue killed one with a swift lunge and a thrust through the eye while his cousins occupied the others, and Barrick swung down from the saddle and forced his way in through the tent flap.

Half a dozen men were backed into the corner of the lavish tent, which was so full of lamps the interior seemed bright as day. Behind them, mostly hidden by the guards, stood a smaller figure with dark hair. Barrick could feel the blood racing in his veins—holy blood, god’s blood. He leveled his sword calmly, as though he could pierce all the guards with one thrust, which at that heady moment did not feel impossible.

Careful—you will overstep ... warned Ynnir’s quiet voice, but Barrick could hardly hear it through the roaring triumph of his thoughts. Find yourself, manchild.

Oh, but I have found myself, he thought. And I have found our enemy. “Step out, Sulepis, you coward!” he shouted at the shape half-hidden behind the guards. “You have thrown men’s lives at us like they were stones. Will you test your own arm?”

The one who stepped out was not the man Barrick expected. In fact, it was not a man at all, but a woman, strongly built and with her black hair cut short. She was clearly a Xixian but broader than any of the guards. She had a brutish look in her small eyes.

“Who you, little flea?” she demanded, her accent thick, her voice deep and hoarse.

“The autarch’s death—and yours if you are hiding him, woman.”

The woman laughed, showing discolored teeth. “I not autarch’s wife! I am Tanyssa—I am Royal Strangler of Seclusion!” She lifted her surprisingly large hands to show she held a long knife in one and dangled a red silken cord from the other. “Come. I send you to hell.”

The old Barrick would have wasted time on foolish doubts about fighting a woman, but this Barrick leaped forward, sword swinging. The guards bunched together in front of him—apparently the strangler’s life was more valuable than theirs—and he suddenly realized he had set himself a problem that might be beyond even the skills the Fireflower had brought him. He managed to kill two of them, but the other four had him surrounded and the strangler Tanyssa was doing her best to reach his unprotected side with her blade when three dark shapes slipped into the tent, yellow eyes aglow.

“Do you require any help, Barrick Eddon?” Longscratch asked.

Barrick deflected a blow meant to take his head off and then spun away from the woman’s long knife. “I would accept some, yes.”

A moment later, the Tricksters were among the guards, ivory rashayi digging into flesh and even through Xixian armor. Barrick leaped over a newly fallen corpse toward the muscular woman. She spun to pull something from a golden chest.

“Where is the autarch?” Barrick demanded, his blade only a quivering inch from her back. Where is he?”

She turned around slowly to reveal she was holding a small piece of clouded crystal in her fingers and grinning like a castle gargoyle. “This to protect Golden One,” the strangler said with a note of satisfaction. “Golden One gone now—I use to kill you!” And as Barrick stared in astonishment, Tanyssa popped the murky gem into her mouth like a sweetmeat.

Sand sprang into the air as if from every corner of the tent, a whirling cloud that blinded Barrick, but the sand rushed past him as though the strangler were its target, flowing over her, covering her body in tiny particles of stone. In the rush of air and sand, most of the lanterns blew out. The guards, suddenly uninterested in Barrick and the Qar, broke away and ran shouting in terror toward the tent door.

The thing that had been Tanyssa seemed to be getting larger but also more shapeless, no woman anymore but only a vague figure, big as an Ettin and growing bigger, with clublike hands that sprouted spiky claws. It had eyes like stars behind fog and a mouth that seemed a pit leading down into darkness. An unlucky guard that had not escaped was caught and shoved toward it by one of the Tricksters; the thing snatched up the screaming Xixian with talons that clacked like broken bricks, then lifted him to its gaping hole of a mouth, swallowed the hapless southerner to the shoulders and bit down. As the rest of the guard’s still-twitching body fell to the monster’s feet one of the Tricksters flung a lamp, but it bounced off the demon’s stony skin and spread gobbets of fire along the tent wall.

“Run!” Longscratch shouted as he scrambled for the door. “We cannot kill a Stone Swallower!”

Flames ran everywhere. Barrick pushed his way through the smoke and followed the Tricksters outside. A moment later, with a bellow like a hamstrung bull, the thing that had been Tanyssa burst through the blazing silk in a shower of sparks.

Who do I pray to now? Barrick wondered as he dragged himself to his feet once more. The gods are asleep! Arrows whipcracked past him. The other Qar were hurrying toward the scene, but although a dozen arrows hit the demon, they bounced away and the thing hardly seemed to notice. Even the Fireflower voices had gone quiet in confusion or fear.

“Turn and run, Barrick Eddon!” Longscratch shouted. “There is no killing a beast like that. It is too strong ...!”

“No! It will kill dozens of our warriors if we let it go!” he shouted back. The thing had caught Blackspine’s horse and although the Trickster leaped off and escaped, the Stone Swallower was tearing the still living animal into pieces. Shouting as loud as he could, as much to keep out the terrible sound of the horse’s death as to steel himself, Barrick picked up his sword and ran forward, then slashed at the thing’s arm. It was like attacking a stone wall; the monster scarcely seemed to feel it. Other Qar joined him, jabbing at the thing with spears but achieving no more than Barrick had. The Stone Swallower caught those who came too close and tore them apart with horrifying speed and strength. Barrick picked up a spear and threw it, but it bounced off uselessly. The inhuman silhouette stood stark against the burning tent, a victim in each hand. Barrick couldn’t tell if the ruined corpses were horses or Qar.

The beast’s bloody, scraping hand closed on him and this time all Barrick could do was hack at it over and over until the demon flung him to the ground like a man harried by biting flies. The fall dashed the air out of his lungs; for a moment blackness flowed over him as though he had tumbled into a cold, lightless river. He felt the Fireflower folding around him as if to ease him into the waiting dark, but then he heard one of the Tricksters screeching in agony, and Barrick swam back toward the light and the world.

As he tried to struggle to his feet, a huge, icy hand curled around him. He smelled breath that stank like molten iron as the Stone Swallower lifted him toward its gaping mouth. Most of the strength had run from Barrick’s body as if he were a stuffed doll that had lost its sawdust. From the corner of his eye he could see flames, but now they had sprouted in a most unexpected place—out on the water of the Bay, great flaming banners rippling above the autarch’s ships. He could not understand what that meant and, dying, did not much care. A voice drifted up from his memory—not the Fireflower, but old Shaso, berating him: “You always ask to be given quarter when you tire, but your enemies will not care!”

This thing thinks it’s already killed me ...!

The black maw stretched wide just before him. He knew he would have only one chance. He braced himself in the monster’s grip, then shoved his sword as far as he could into the thing’s mouth.

His blade vanished, ripped from his grasp by the violence of the creature’s convulsion. It dropped him, then reared up over him with a horrible gurgling howl so loud it seemed the sky itself had torn loose from its vault, a seemingly unending howl of fury and pain. It gasped and coughed and gurgled wetly. A bloody, smoke-colored stone fell to the sand beside Barrick. Then the sky, or something just as big and dark, crashed down on top of him and stole the world away.

26. By the Light of Burning Ships

Briony’s moment of hope was short-lived. As the Xixians on the waterfront fled from the attack of the airborne Rooftoppers and their birds, a force of the autarch’s cavalry burst out from the town and came thundering down Market Road toward the harbor.

Briony joined Eneas and his remaining soldiers as they wheeled to face this new and deadly charge; all the nearby Qar quickly joined them. Some of the fairies were mounted on horses as beautiful and slender as the sticklike creatures she had seen in ancient mosaics, and the riders were even stranger than their mounts. Some of these new allies weren’t even people, but foxes and wolves and wild forest cats whose very presence made the Syannese horses skittish.

“Do not lose heart!” Eneas cried to his men, who had begun to scatter in fear as the alien Qar came among them. “These are allies! Together we will bring the southern Falcon down!”

They met the charging Xixians at the place where Market Road crossed the dock road. As the two troops crashed together, the clamor of steel on steel and the screaming of both horses and men was so heart-breaking that Briony, still a dozen yards back from the fighting, wanted to clap her hands over her ears until the dreadful noise stopped.

Why was I so stubborn? Why did I think I should ride to war like a man? She was terrified.

But even the bravest of these knights must be frightened, she suddenly thought. Even Eneas himself. It didn’t matter why she was here—she was here.

Briony had little time after that to think about anything except staying alive, dealing enough blows to defend herself, or to help an ally in need—she saved a bulky, bearlike creature from a mounted spearman by hammering the Xixian’s helmet with her sword and knocking him out of the saddle. The bear-thing did not stop to thank her, but only hurried off to another part of the fray.

She stayed back from the thickest fighting where her smaller size and reach would be a disadvantage, striking only when she had to. If the southerners managed to push past on just one side, Briony’s company and their allies would be caught between two halves of the autarch’s forces and quickly squeezed to death. Torches were streaming toward Market Road from the fields and the town—hundreds, maybe thousands more of the autarch’s foot soldiers still making their way to the battle. Eneas was too deep in the battle to see it, fighting for his life—without a miracle, there would be no escape from this nightmare except death.

Then the bay behind her exploded into flame.

No, not the bay, Briony saw as she struggled to turn her startled horse. Tongues of fire ran up the mast and along the furled sails of the nearest Xixian ship; as she stared, a dozen more vessels, large and small, kindled one after another. The flames seemed to leap across the bay like living things, two or three southern ships catching fire at a time until dozens were ablaze and the wavering red light of their burning fell across the battlefield as brightly as if the setting sun had returned. All around her, voices called out in surprise, wonder, and horror.

In the midst of this apparent world’s ending, both sides again flung themselves at each other in the scarlet glow. With their means of escape now gone, the Xixians fought with growing desperation. The line of battle moved like a living thing. One moment the Qar and Syannese seemed poised to overrun the Xixians and drive them out of their own camp, then a few moments later the shape of the struggle convulsed again and the Syannese and the Qar became the desperate ones as they were forced back to the edge of Brenn’s Bay.

A crackling arc of fire leaped out from behind Briony and set one of the nearest Xixian tents ablaze. A dozen more fiery streaks followed and several struck buildings along the waterfront, setting flames in their rafters and roofs. A few even reached the town’s watchtower and within moments it, too, was blazing like a great torch.

Fire arrows! Where was this attack coming from? The water? The bay was black and shiny as pitch, ships and water both striped with smears of shuddering, blazing light. The autarch’s ships were all on fire now, the survivors swimming for their lives—who could be shooting arrows?

Her answer came a moment later as long, dark shapes began to slide up onto the beach, dozens of long, low boats pushed through the shallows by dark figures who whooped and shouted as they dropped the boats and came running up from the water, some already loosing more fiery arrows into the Xixian camp. Why were they helping? Who were they?

Skimmers! she realized in astonishment as the first of the long-armed newcomers came sprinting up the beach and threw themselves onto the nearest Xixians.

“Egye-Var!” they screamed, jabbing with their fishing spears and slashing with strange swords as short and heavy bladed as butcher’s cleavers. The southerners staggered back in dismay at this latest and most unexpected assault.

Briony felt a cry well up in her own throat. “Erivor—and Eddon!” she screamed, spurring her horse back into the thick of the fighting.

Barrick watched the girl crawling through the maze as though he were a bird hovering high above her, distant and detached. He could see how hopelessly far she was from the way out, but he could not find his voice to tell her and was not even certain he should bother. The black-haired girl looked familiar but he could not summon her name. That disappointed him, although he did not know why.

She is precious, a voice told him. More precious than even you know. It was the blind king speaking, he knew, but he did not understand why this nameless young woman should mean anything to him.

First of the last, the king told him. Last of the first.

What did that mean? Why was it so hard to think?

Do not forsake her, the king said.

He tried to ask, What do you mean? But nothing would pass his lips. He might have been some mute creature, a bird, a horse, watching things far beyond its understanding.

First of the last, the voice said, quieter this time, farther away. Last of the first. Marriage of the dead. Hope for the living ...

What does it mean? But still he could not speak; the words were only in his own head, only in his own lonely, friendless thoughts.

No, Barrick Eddon.

The voice sounded different this time, closer—and it was a woman’s voice. Could it be the dark-haired girl? Was she aware of him at last?

Come back to us, Barrick Eddon. Come back. It is not time for this journey yet. The roads are wrong. The darkness began to slip away like sand through an hourglass and a different, brighter world began to appear behind it.

“No!” Barrick cried, finding his voice at last. “She’ll be lost! She’ll be lost ...”

“She still has a chance,” someone said to him—another female voice, this one deeper and also more familiar than the first. “Do not give up hope.”

A face was looking down at him, a pale oval with black eyes and an expression so calmly patient it might have been carved in marble—Saqri, the queen of the Fay.

“Hope ... ?” he asked. He felt light-headed, but at the same time his body ached badly. A shadow, he remembered—a great shadow had fallen over him and pushed him into the darkness. “So dark ...!”

“It is all one thing,” Saqri said. “What you saw, what you fear, what you fought. All one thing concealed in a thousand, thousand guises. And that one thing is oblivion. Remember that, Barrick Eddon. The worst that can happen is that you cease to exist. Is that so bad?” Saqri had shed her battle armor and now wore a robe of shining white silk. A smaller Qar woman stood beside her, her angular features and animal eyes making her seem both less human and less frightening than the queen. “This is Sunset Pearl,” Saqri said. “She is a healer.”

Urayanu, the Fireflower voices murmured. She of the Strengthening Touch.

“What happened?” Something was missing. How had he come here?

“You destroyed the Stone Swallower, then you fell.”

“That thing, that woman or ... monster.... Who was she?”

Saqri shook her head. “Some minion of the autarch’s. But the stone she had from her master—that was a great weapon indeed. A broken bit of tile, a small piece of Silvergleam’s ruined moon-palace—a kulik Khors, as some mortals named them. As the greater Tiles can open a door across the roads of Grandmother Void, so too can one of those bits of stone. But it only opens doors to a very unpleasant place, and when the way is open, one of the things that lives there comes through to inhabit the body of the Stone Swallower. That is what you saw. That is what you fought.” She turned to the other Qar woman. “How are the manchild’s wounds?”

“The worst was that the thing fell on him in its death throes,” the small woman said. “He will survive, my lady, but he needs rest.”

“And that he will have. Thank you, Sunset Pearl.” Saqri reached down and touched her cool fingers to Barrick’s brow. “You did a brave thing, manchild. You set yourself against a terrible, pitiless foe who would have killed many. ...”

He suddenly remembered what had been happening before his encounter with the Stone Swallower. “The autarch—all those soldiers—what happened? Did we beat him?”

“The southern king is no longer in the camp by the bay,” Saqri told him. “But I think you guessed that already. He has taken his strongest forces and gone into the depths, so the danger is as great as ever. We and our unexpected mortal allies only had to fight troops he left behind, though even those were many times our number.” She told him of the success of their plan, how the bird-mounted archers and the Skimmers with their flaming arrows and their small, silent boats had astonished the Xixians. “Only the surprise of our cousins’ attacks saved us,” Saqri finished. “The southerners broke and the survivors fled into the hills, so for the moment we are safe.” She shook her head so gently her glossy black hair barely moved. “My husband was right. He often told me that one day we would fight beside our sundered kin again. I was certain he was only hoping for something that could never be.”

“And you?” Barrick asked. He was tired and in pain, but he felt a stronger connection to the queen than ever before. “Are you well, Saqri? Have you rested?”

“I have just risen from a hundred years spent in unwilling sleep, Barrick Eddon. I will not need to rest again until my race is run.” She touched her fingers together to form Spider’s Sleep, which announced a moment of change. “Time is important to us now ... and time is short. I am going now to meet with the mortal soldiers who aided us and talk with them of what will come next. I would be glad to have you with me.” She looked at him for a long moment. “But I think Sunset Pearl would be angry with me if I brought you out. You have been near the edge and are only just back.” She hesitated, something he did not remember seeing from her. “Unless it is that you miss the chance to speak with your own kind?”

Barrick shook his head. Just the thought was exhausting. “I scarcely remember speaking with my own kind, and I don’t feel any strong urge to do it again. Who are they, anyway? Do you know yet?”

Again Saqri seemed to consider. “They are commanded by a prince of Syan. I am told his name is Eneas.”

“Enander’s son? I know of him. He is said to be a good man.” Barrick let his head sag back down onto the cushion. “If I am truly needed, I’ll manage. I’ll come. ...”

“You have convinced me,” said the queen. “Stay. Rest and grow stronger.” She bent and kissed his forehead with a touch dry as paper.

When Saqri had gone the healer named Sunset Pearl came back to Barrick’s bedside with a cup in her hand. “Drink this,” she said. “I think it will do you no harm, and it may do you much good.”

He stared at her. He was feeling truly tired now, struggling to keep his eyes open. “You think it will do me no harm?”

She looked back at him sourly. There was something catlike about her, but it was a cat that had seen many years and many disappointments. “I have never plied my craft on a mortal man. Content yourself that if you die in terrible agony I will at least know what not to do with the next mortal.”

He laughed a bit despite himself. “And who do you think will recommend any other mortals come to you if you kill me?” He lifted the cup to his lips, closing his eyes to try to make sense out of the unexpected but not wholly unpleasant flavors.

“You did not come to me by choice, Barrick Eddon,” the healer said, “and I doubt the others needing my help in days ahead will be any different.” Her look was less amused than resigned. “In truth, I expect to see more than a few dead and dying mortals here. Now drink up, Redling.”

The name and its hint of the familiar puzzled him for a moment. He lay back and closed his eyes. “Strange,” he told the healer, if she was still there. “I’m certain someone used to call me that ... but I can’t remember who ...”

The Xixian carrack, or what remained of it, had been driven far onto the sand by the tide, but the big ship still blazed like a Zosimia bonfire, outshining the smaller but still sizable campfire that the Syannese soldiers had made near the water’s edge.

Southmarch Castle lay just across the water. Briony could not quite accustom herself to that thought after so much time away—her home waited just across the bay. Just as the burning ship dwarfed the fire Briony shared with Eneas and his commanders, so the torches on the castle’s battlements shone much brighter than the stars above the smoke-shrouded bay.

“Are you warm enough, Princess?” Eneas asked.

She almost laughed. Only a couple of hours before, men had been trying to murder her with spears and swords. “I am quite well, thank you. When are they coming?”

“The messenger said ...” Eneas paused. “Look. They come.”

A strange procession was making its way along the strand toward them by the light of burning Xixian ships that still smoldered on the bay. Some of the Syannese soldiers camped around their own small fires got up and scrambled away, although the Qar did not come close to any of them. Briony could understand their alarm. No one could see so many weird shapes and gaits go past or meet the gaze of those glowing eyes—orange, yellow, green as a will-o’-the-wisp—without feeling that something had changed forever, and not necessarily for the best.

The newcomers slipped up to the edge of the prince’s fire and then stopped. At first Briony wondered why, but then a slender figure dressed in white stepped forward.

“May we share your fire?” The woman’s voice had a strange music—Briony did not understand her words until a moment after she had finished. “I am Saqri, mistress of Qul-na-Qar. You would call me the queen of these folk.”

“Of course, Majesty,” Eneas said. “You are welcome here.”

Saqri beckoned a small group of her own people to accompany her to the fire; the rest, perhaps two or three dozen at the most, promptly sat down on the ground. Relieved, the prince’s soldiers went back to eating their well-earned meals and bandaging their wounds. They had already buried their dead. The Syannese had lost many men, but the Xixians had lost far more.

The fairy queen was not quite what Briony had expected. She was beautiful, of course, with skin as translucent as snow and eyes so wide and black that Briony was frightened to look into them for more than an instant. But although Saqri’s beauty, preternatural stillness, and calm bearing lifted her above any mortal monarch, she was not tall. Briony was at least half a span taller. And even the Qar-woman’s grace did not entirely hide the fact that she was sore and weary.

Eneas offered wine, and to Briony’s surprise Saqri and most of her companions accepted it, although some of them had trouble drinking from cups. When they had been served, Eneas cleared his throat.

“So, Queen Saqri,” he said, “we are grateful for your help today fighting the Xixians, but before we talk of anything else, I must know something. Are we still at war, your people and mine?”

The fairy queen’s mouth pulled tight for a moment in what might have been a smile. “You ask a good question.” For a brief moment the Qar woman’s penetrating gaze left him and turned to Briony, who could not face it and looked away; instantly, she was angry with herself. “The answer, Prince Eneas,” Saqri told him, “is that we are what we make of ourselves tonight, at this fire. But know this ...! Even though we may continue as allies, we will never be friends.” She was looking at Briony again. “Your people—and particularly those who live in this castle—have taken things from me that cannot be replaced or forgiven.” The fairy queen spoke with such feeling that Briony sensed the Syannese knights around her growing wary. “But I am not Yasammez, the dark lady you have already met and whom you already fear,” Saqri told them, her voice turning measured once more. “She is the one who warred on Southmarch ... although I admit I did not discourage her. Her bitterness toward your kind will never heal. But on this matter I have broken from her, and the People follow me.” Saqri spread her hands. “So, Prince of Syan, our peoples are at peace as long as we fight together. There will be no treachery. Not from my folk, at least.”

Eneas nodded. “Nor mine, I swear. So then, let us put the past aside and talk only of things that matter now. What do you plan? Has the autarch truly gone down into the ground under the castle, as I hear?”

“Tomorrow’s sun brings Midsummer’s Eve,” Saqri said. “The day after is Midsummer, and when Midsummer ends, the hour we fear will be upon us. The year begins to die. The sun begins its slow journey away from the earth and the spirits of discord rejoice.” She raised her hand as if in warning. “If the southern king, Sulepis the Autarch, defeats the few Funderlings who still resist him and reaches his goal in the depths beneath the castle by midnight of Midsummer’s Day, he will be able to perform the ritual. He will open the gate of dream and free the gods.”

“I have never heard of such a thing, not even in old tales,” said Eneas. “Why would he do it?”

“It is said the southern king wishes to command a god ... but this Sulepis may not wield as much power as he thinks.” The Qar woman spoke quietly, but everyone at the fire strained to hear. “He may open a door that cannot be shut again. And there is nothing ... nothing ... to give us promise that the gods who come through will be awake and sane.” Saqri made an odd gesture, hands spread on either side of her face. “In any case, though, it is certain that if the way to the gods is opened, it is this world—our world—that will suffer.”

“Then we will help you, of course,” said Eneas. “Strange as it all still seems, I have seen much to convince me today. We must fight with you to keep the autarch from his goal.”

“Yes, you must fight with us,” Saqri said. “But not beside us, I think. Your knights are not best suited for the battle beneath the castle ...”

“Why this slander?” Lord Helkis demanded. “Our good men of Syan have held a wooden guard tower against a Xixian army ten times their number—you saw them on the field today! They fear nothing!”

“You misunderstand me.” Saqri held the Syannese noble’s stare for a moment until he dropped his head in a mixture of fury and shame. “I did not say they were not capable or brave, I said they were not best suited. Can they see in near-darkness like our Changing tribe? Can they make their own light in the depths like the Elementals? Can they break stone with their fingers like the Deep Ettins?” She extended her own hand, palm up. “Your men are brave, but the best of them are horsemen. In the steep black depths they would quickly become less than their best. Here beneath the sky, in Southmarch itself, they can make certain that Tolly the Protector does not throw in his forces on the side of the autarch.”

“Surely no northerner, no matter how corrupt, would do such a thing,” protested Eneas.

“But he already has.” She said it with such calm that Briony knew even Eneas would believe her. “Our luck was good, though, and the two of them fell out over something. But when a creature like Hendon Tolly sees how things are going, he will fight fiercely to preserve his own life. If he attacks us from behind, that alone could slow us enough to allow the autarch the time he needs ...”

“But how do you know so much about the plans and doings of mortals?” Briony asked. “About Tolly and the Xixians?”

“I know much about you, too, Briony Eddon,” said the fairy queen. “Do not forget, until this moment our peoples have been at war. You may know little of the Qar, but it does not follow that the Qar also know little of you. We have long had ...” She trailed off.

“Spies?” Briony demanded. “So—you, too? Is there anyone in this failing world who has not made my family’s business their own? And why should I trust you, madam, to decide how my own castle is to be defended?”

“Trust? I have told you nothing that you cannot see for yourself. Prince Eneas, your men are horsemen—they would be wasted in the dark, cramped tunnels. Go to the castle. Find Tolly and kill him or imprison him. If you can do that, then feel free to send help to us through the gate to Funderling Town.”

Briony turned to Eneas. “Don’t do it!” The look on his face made her want to shout. Surely he could not so easily trust these fairies, who only weeks before had tried to throw down Southmarch and had killed so many of its citizens!

“Wait, I begin to understand,” said the fairy queen. “It is your father, is it not, child? He is the true matter we discuss.” Saqri pinned her with her gaze, and this time Briony could not escape it. “You want to march with us into the depths because your father is there—because you hope to save him from the autarch’s clutches.”

“No!” Briony said, although the fairy woman was absolutely right. “You know nothing about him ...!”

“On the contrary—I know more about your father than I know of almost any other mortal. But that is not the point.” Saqri reached out and clutched her arm. Briony tried to shake herself free but felt suddenly weak as an infant. The fairy woman’s voice took on a harsher edge. “Look at me, child! Your family is at the center of many things, but I can tell you this—it is not held for you to save your father. I am not one of my people’s Gray Egrets—I cannot peer through the future’s veil—but I feel strongly and clearly enough how things must be to tell you that. Do not waste your warriors’ lives on a selfish gamble, Briony Eddon. It could be that we Qar will find him and free him, but his fate will come to him whether you are beside him or not.”

Tears filled Briony’s eyes; she blinked, then wiped them away. Saqri’s voice grew quieter now, almost kind. “I cannot say I feel sorry for you—not after what your family has done to mine—but I do know something of loss, and I also know something of confusion. For a long time I did not know whether to hate or forget. I have come now to believe hate is useless ... but so is forgetting. Those who forget too easily are the toys of fate.”

Briony’s tears threatened to overspill again. “But what should I do?” she asked, and was not even certain to whom she spoke.

“Live, Briony Eddon,” the fairy queen told her. “Live and remember. Remember and learn.”

The dark-haired girl was running from him now. No matter how he tried to call out to her, to calm her, she wouldn’t stop, as if he himself had become the thing she feared. He didn’t immediately know where they were—at first he was not certain it was a place—but as he pursued her, he began to recognize the walls and stone floors of Southmarch.

He was in the Portrait Hall now, in front of the picture of Queen Sanasu that had so often caught his attention. Now, as he looked into his ancestor’s dark eyes, he saw for the first time that her expression was not the distant, superior thing he had always thought, but a combination of many things—loss, fear, anger, and perhaps a little hope; even stranger, though, the portrait was moving, rippling as though something behind it was struggling to emerge.

He stretched out his hands toward the red-haired queen and began to scrape away what lay on the surface. It was not a picture at all, he realized—it was dirt, only dirt, but the more he scraped, the more dirt he found. He could still feel the movement just below his hands, so he doubled his effort, digging faster and faster until his fingers curled around something small and hard and cool to the touch. He pulled it out of the clinging earth and found he was holding a stone statue of the dark-haired girl, her face frozen in a look of terror. But even as he stared at it, the statue fell apart into a clump of shiny beetles that tumbled from his hands and began to crawl and fly away like a handful of spilled jewels. He cried out and tried to catch them, but within moments they had all vanished into the earth once more.

“Time grows short, Eneas Karallios,” the queen of the fairies said. The light of the burning ships made the shadows of those gathered jump and caper like demons. “Have you come to a decision?”

“Please, do not trust them so easily, Eneas!” Briony pleaded.

“I am sorry, Princess,” he said. “Truly sorry, you must believe me, but I must consider the safety of my own men first and, ultimately, my own country. That means I must also trust my own instincts, and those tell me that the fairy folk are right ...” He raised his voice. “We will do as you say, Queen Saqri.”

“Good. Then we have done all we can do here,” Saqri said. “The rest of the southerners are scattered through the hills. They will not come back soon.”

Briony did not trust herself to speak. They were going to leave her father’s fate to the fairies. For a moment she entertained several wild schemes of how she could search for him by herself, but Briony knew she couldn’t leave Eneas and his Syannese soldiers to free her home without her. Dull resignation set in.

“But when they see how small our numbers are, the Xixies now hiding in the hills will come back,” Eneas said to Saqri. “What then?”

“You will be across the water and beyond their reach,” the queen assured him. “Our allies will see to that ...”

“Allies?” Eneas asked. “What allies are those ...?”

Briony would have sooner blinded herself than let the Qar woman see her fighting back tears of anger, but as she turned to leave this foolish, misbegotten council behind, she was distracted by a tall figure staggering up the beach from the Qar’s tiny settlement of tents, headed toward the bonfire. At first she thought from its stiff-legged movements that it must be one of the Qar, but as it came closer she saw that, other than the odd, hobbling gait, the slender figure looked quite human. Its hair seemed to have the reddish color of the fire itself.

How strange, she thought—so much like Barrick’s ...

She stood, thunderstruck, as her brother limped past her and made his way toward the fairy queen. Barrick wore loose-fitting clothes, shirt and breeches of white cloth only a little darker than his skin, which seemed paler than she remembered, and he was a full head taller than Barrick had been the last time she saw him. Still, there could be no doubt it was her brother.

“Saqri!” he cried as he reached the queen, “Saqri, I understand now!” He noticed the others staring at him, although he had not yet seen Briony, and made a gesture she did not recognize. “Pardon.” He turned back to the queen. “Qinnitan! The girl named Qinnitan—she is here! She is here, and I think she must be under the castle! I forgot her for the longest time—but how could that be? How could I forget someone so important?”

Saqri did not have a chance to respond before Briony pushed through the strange creatures ranged on the Qar side of the fire and stepped in front of him. “Barrick? Is that really you?” But it was—there could be no mistake. She threw herself at him, arms wide. “Barrick!”

To her astonishment, he did not respond at all; it was as though she embraced a stone oracle in a temple. “Who is this?” he asked, stepping back and pushing her arms away.

She stared at him in amazement. It was without doubt the face she had looked into like a mirror all her life—her brother, her twin. “Barrick, it’s me, Briony! Your sister! Don’t you recognize me?” She was stunned. Had she changed so much?

And then something came into his eyes ... but it was not what she had expected, not at all. She saw a gleam of memory, but also mistrust and even irritation. “Ah. Of course—Briony. And have you been well, sister? It has been a very long time.”

“Well?” She stepped back as though he had slapped her. “Barrick Eddon, what’s happened to you? Why do you treat me this way? I have feared for you and suffered for your sake every day since we were separated. Do you tell me you have not thought of me at all?”

Instead of answering, he turned to the queen of the Fay with a helpless look on his face, as though asking for aid.

“Much has happened since you saw each other last,” Saqri said. “Doubtless, you will find much to talk to your sister about when all this is over, Barrick Eddon. But now our time is short.”

Barrick nodded as though that summed everything up perfectly. “I wish you well, Briony,” he said, then nodded in Eneas’ direction as well. “And of course our other mortal allies, too. Saqri, I must speak to you when you return. I can feel Qinnitan’s presence. She is here—I’m certain the autarch has her.” He paused as if he might say more, then turned and limped back down the beach toward the Qar camp.

Briony stared after him, aching inside as though she had swallowed a handful of freezing stones. Within a few moments her brother had vanished into the dark once more.

27. Full of the Stuff

The goblins were busy dismantling Yasammez’s tent, but when the Elementals shivered into view they hopped out of the way, nimble as crickets, before returning to their chores. Neither Yasammez’s chief eremite Aesi’uah or any of the others paid them any further attention. Goblins, especially those who labored in the larger houses, were legendarily discreet.

Only a few dozen other creatures remained in the large cavern known as Sandsilver’s Dancing Room, most of them engaged like the goblins in removing all remnants of the camp that wouldn’t dissolve or disappear on their own. The chamber was full of unusual scents and sounds; some of the rendering powders smelled like burning flowers; some of the laborers sang or rubbed their wings instead of speaking.

The newly arrived Elementals stood before Yasammez. “Hail, Great Lady,” said Stone of the Unwilling, courteously diffusing the glare of his presence. “You called, we came.”

“Is that true?” The dark lady pitched her voice in the tone that the Elementals could see as a cold blue light. “Because there are other times I have called you but did not receive such a swift answer. In fact, I received no answer at all.”

Stone of the Unwilling shifted, flickered. “My lady?”

“You have always been faithful to your people’s old promises,” Yasammez said, “both to me and to the Fireflower.”

“Of course, Lady. And I am still faithful.”

“Perhaps. But I would have hoped you would have brought me a clanswoman who would be as faithful in friendship and courage as you are… instead of this one.”

The smaller Elemental’s glow jittered a bilious yellow for a moment before she spoke. “Mistress, do you doubt my loyalty to the People?”

“I make no accusations, Shadow’s Cauldron, but I do ask why you have not responded to my call. Three times I summoned you, and three times the void in which your people swim like fishes sent me back no word of you.”

Yellow-green flashed again. “And does that make me a traitor, Mistress?”

“Clanswoman!” It was easy to see that Stone of the Unwilling was agitated; his light jiggled like wind-whipped fire beneath his wrappings. “That is no way to speak to the Daughter.”

“Not even a demigoddess can call me traitor.”

Watching this bizarre confrontation, the councillor Aesi’uah felt a shadow of superstitious terror fall over her. The Elementals were the last and fiercest of the races to join in the confederation of the People; some said they wielded powers that even the Fireflower dynasty feared. Stone of the Unwilling’s people would make terrible enemies.

“Why so much anger, Shadow’s Cauldron?” the eremite asked aloud, framing her hands in a carefully chosen gesture of supplication. “That does not seem best for people surrounded by enemies, as we are.”

“But we begin to wonder whether it is Lady Yasammez herself who is no longer as firmly in service to her people as she would have us believe,” said the smaller Elemental.

“Clanswoman, I do not understand you,” said Stone of the Unwilling. “Clearly, we must go somewhere where the winds and lights of our words can play unhindered, so you can explain this outrageous behavior to me.” He turned to Yasammez, his robes billowing in his discontent. “Forgive us, Mistress. Forgive my clanswoman.”

The lights glared from Shadow’s Cauldron’s hood, and her arms stretched as though she might reach all the way to the high ceiling of the cavern, but she was only reshaping herself; when she had finished, she made herself into a strange replica of Yasammez, but she had let slip the ribbons covering her face and what hung before them was a terrible, empty glare. “Why did you give up the Seal of War?” she said. “Tell us why, Lady.”

“It is hardly your place to demand answers.” Her thoughts were as cold as stinging sleet. “I did what was best for the People.”

“You gave both your blessing and your army to Saqri, wife and sister of the mortals’ greatest friend in Qul-na-Qar, that traitor Ynnir!” Shadow’s Cauldron’s thoughts were sharp and comfortless. “If you needed any more proof, she has already brought a mortal into our midst and all but shares her power with him! A mortal! Together, they will throw away lives by the handful, when there is only one weapon we need to destroy this southern upstart and his plans.” She flourished her gloved hand and the gleaming sphere that was the Fever Egg appeared there. “Do not try to take it from me,” she warned. “It is an image, no more. But it has been given to the Elementals and we will make certain it is well-used.”

“This goes too far ...” began Stone of the Unwilling.

“It is powerfully close to the very treachery you deny,” said Aesi’uah.

“Who are you, eremite?” spat Shadow’s Cauldron. “A creature of bones and mud. Not to mention one of the Dreamless—an entire country of traitors… !”

“Enough.” The voice of Yasammez was like a whipcrack in all their thoughts. Though she made no audible sound, the goblins carrying her tent across the other side of the cavern fell to the floor, clutching their heads in terror. “Silence—all of you. Do you know to whom you speak, woman of the Elementals? Has no one told you?” Yasammez took a step forward, and although the movement was slight, the Elementals’ robes billowed as though a great wind had come. “I am Yasammez of the Wanderwind Mountains, the daughter of Crooked himself! You dare to hold your judgment up to mine?”

“You have given up the Seal of War… !”

“I have given the Seal of War to Saqri, the last in my family’s line—the hearth of the Fireflower! It was she and her husband-brother who gave the Seal to me in the first place.” She closed her outstretched hand and the image of the Fever Egg was suddenly gone from Shadow’s Cauldron’s hand. “Now I will tell you what will happen. You will listen and understand. If you do not obey me, the void will not recognize you and the wind will not carry you nor the darkness hide you.”

“Since we swore our loyalty to the Fireflower, we have always been its strongest and most determined allies,” declared a fretful, flickering Stone of the Unwilling. “This is only a small dispute, Mistress—a confusion created by the fires and shadows of war.”

Yasammez gave him a cold look and went on as though he had not spoken. “I do not know what will happen in these final days. I do not know what my own role will be. I do know what yours will be, Shadow’s Cauldron. You will keep the Fever Egg safe and unbroken until I say otherwise. Do you understand?”

The flicker of the Elemental’s fire was purplish and sullen. “I will never ...”

Yasammez opened her hand, and this time Shadow’s Cauldron rose into the air and grew smaller and smaller until she was little bigger than the Egg itself, a small black bundle leaking light.

“The Egg must not be shattered unless I tell you to do so.” Yasammez’s words were like precise hammer blows. “Under no other circumstances will it be employed. Thus I bind you and command you by the fire that is in us all. Do you understand?”

The purplish glow guttered and then grew again, this time suffused with a deep, leavening blue. “I understand,” Shadow’s Cauldron said at last.

“And agree?”

Blue deepened into violet. “Yes. I agree.”

Yasammez dropped her hand and allowed the Elemental to unfold into more ordinary proportions. “Furthermore, the next time I summon you, you will come like the biting winds of the Between are blowing you. Do you understand and agree?”

“Agree.”

“That is enough, then. I have other matters to attend to.” Yasammez stepped back, and the pressure that had made the cavern seem to be shrinking around them suddenly diminished. “These may be the last days of the People. Do not let your petty schemes and hatreds betray you—or us.”

And then she turned and walked from the cavern. Aesi’uah followed, more than a little alarmed.

Stone of the Unwilling, so discomfited that his light flickered, found his voice at last. “What were you thinking, Clanswoman? You challenged the dark lady!”

“She will betray us all if we let her. I feel it. Many in the clan feel it. You are too old, too trusting. When the mortals are gone… yes, and when the mortalloving Fireflower dynasty is ended… the earth and all its colors and sounds will be ours!”

“You can call me what you want, foolish young one. If you meddle with Yasammez, she will destroy you without a second thought. She is the daughter of a god!”

“She is stronger than I supposed,” Shadow’s Cauldron admitted. “But she has given us the greatest weapon of all.”

“Do not think to use it against her!” Stone of the Unwilling was clearly disturbed. “That is folly beyond any I have ever seen. She will know, and she will destroy you—perhaps destroy all our clan!”

“We are the Elementals,” his clanswoman told him. “We should never have let ourselves become the lackeys of the Fireflower. I am not such a fool as to challenge Yasammez again, not without my swarm-sisters and swarm-brothers present, so for now she has the whip hand. But nothing lasts forever.”

And with that she was gone back into the void, leaving Stone of the Unwilling to follow, cursing the young and their foolishness.

The Cavern of Winds was as broad as many of the larger chambers in the lightless depths, and despite their superior numbers the autarch’s troops had not found it easy to conquer; they had only driven out the Funderling defenders a few hours earlier. While the vanguard of the army pushed deeper, Pinimmon Vash and the rest of the moving city prepared the camp.

The great cavern was a strange place, with wind skirling noisily through rifts in the ceiling, droning so continuously that it sometimes seemed to Vash they had stopped to rest inside a hurdy-gurdy. Now that the fighting was over and they could bring in torches, the Xixians had discovered that a great crevice ran along one side of the cavern, a place where part of the massive slab of limestone that made up the floor of most of the room had broken off and tumbled into the depths, leaving only a ragged edge and beyond that, unknown darkness.

Pinimmon Vash’s mood should have been improved by the knowledge that he was surrounded by thousands of Xixian fighting men, but it made little difference except that in his nightmares of collapsing earth, he was now accompanied into crushing, smothering death by many other men, all as helpless as he was.

Still, he was glad for a moment to be in a space that did not make him feel as though he had to crawl under a table just to cross from one side of it to the other. The lights of the fires—still not too many, of course, because of the smoke in the confined space—reflected warmly from the jagged heights of the high ceiling, and altogether the place had a delicate beauty unlike even other larger chambers they had traversed.

But I would still give one of my limbs to be aboveground again for good. The royal prisoner was waiting for him when he emerged from his tent, so Pinimmon Vash shooed away the two boys still meddling with the hem of his robe. He had only been allowed to bring a single pair and felt very inhibited, afraid to give either of them the beatings they deserved for fear of being left with only one healthy servant—or none!

“Is there something I can do for you, King Olin?” he asked, praying silently that the man would not start babbling about the scotarch again. Vash was still considering what he had learned about Prusus.

The northern monarch did not look well. He hadn’t seemed entirely healthy since they had reached Southmarch, but had taken a sharp turn for the worse since the autarch had brought him beneath the ground in their relentless march downward to only-Nushash-and-the-other-gods-knew-where. “Yes, Lord Vash, you can.” Olin smiled, but he looked pale and ill. “You can tell me if the autarch plans to join us today?”

There was something odd about the question—generally the northern king did everything he could to avoid the Golden One—but Vash had not had even one cup of tea yet this morning and his head hurt. “That is not for me to say, King Olin. If we are fortunate, the Golden One may gift us with his presence later. Why?”

Olin mopped sweat from his forehead. He managed a sickly, but still angry, smile. “After all, I do not have much longer to satisfy my curiosity, do I?”

Vash squirmed a little. He cared nothing for the northerner, but was uncomfortable with the amount of time he was being forced to spend with a man whom everyone knew would soon be killed. It seemed to reduce his own importance, for one thing, but there were moments when it bothered him even more than that, in ways Vash could not quite express. He had known many a man who had later been executed, but he had never been asked to sit and talk with the fellow after the sentence had been passed and make sure he was comfortable, in fact to treat him like an honored guest in all ways except one—the manner of his leaving. The fact he should have to do so now was awkward and unfair.

King Olin turned and walked a little distance away; his guards stayed close beside him. For a moment Vash wondered if the northerner had some trickery in mind, but dismissed it. Olin had ample reasons to behave strangely. Perhaps like Vash himself, the knowledge of so much stone and dirt above his head was enough to make the northern king unwell. In any case, even if it was shamming, it scarcely mattered: Olin was now under the constant guard of three of the autarch’s Leopards, all of them armed with matchlock rifles. Still, it did no good to be overconfident—the man truly looked unwell. Vash decided he should ask the guards how Olin was eating. If he died before the Golden One was ready for him it would be a catastrophe.

A skirl of flutes rose and echoed through the cavern; scented smoke billowed from the door of the autarch’s massive tent as it opened. The Nushash priests came out on their hands and knees; even by lamplight Vash could see them struggling to speak their prayers without coughing. The men who filed out after them each carried a length of carved and polished and painted wood—the walk boards, as they were called. With the quickness of a team of acrobats honed by long practice, they dropped onto the ground, arranged themselves on their backs, and then held the boards on top of themselves, steadying them with foreheads, hands, and feet to make a pathway for the autarch to walk upon. Vash knew that the Golden One did not like to use the walk boards for more than a short distance because the men from one end hurrying forward with the heavy boards to throw themselves down in front of him disturbed the serenity of the monarch’s thoughts.

“What think you?” Sulepis was dressed, not in his battle armor as on most days, but in the high, scalloped hat and scarlet robes of a Nushash priest, and his face was striped with ash. He struck a pose and intoned, “May the darkness pass you by.” It was a ritual greeting: today was the Xixian Day of Fires, the day the northern infidels called Midsummer’s Eve. Tomorrow the sun would begin to die.

“And may it pass you by as well, Golden One.” Vash remembered how fearful the holiday had seemed when he was small, especially the evening, the darkness full of mourning cries and the chants of the ash-covered priests. Then, in the middle of the night, crowds of wild women and men (or so it seemed to him then; the child Pinimmon had not recognized that they were simply ordinary people who had been drinking and dancing for hours) would charge through the streets, lighting bonfires and demanding that those in their houses come out and join them in making noise to frighten away the dreadful Deathlord Xergal, who was trying to steal the moon from Nushash’s brother, Xosh. When the sun finally rose the following morning, known as the Day of Smoke, the celebrants would slink back inside to sleep off their excesses. That day the streets were always deserted except for children; Vash could still remember the feeling that he and his younger brothers walked through a city of the dead.

“Yes, Vash, it is strange and wonderful to pass a Day of Fires here beneath the earth, unable even to see the sun.” Despite his words, the autarch did not seem unduly disturbed. He turned to Olin. “I heard you speak my name.” He took a few steps down the line of walk-board slaves. Each slap of his sandal was met with a small grunt as the man beneath took his weight; the autarch was not bulky, but he was very tall. “You seem glum, King Olin,” Sulepis said to the northerner, bending over him like a concerned parent. “Is our hospitality lacking? Is there something more you wish of me, King Olin?”

Olin nodded and even made and held a long bow, which seemed odd—he had always gone out of his way to avoid showing Sulepis any but the broadest social courtesies. “Yes. Yes, I do. I wish you… dead!”

To Vash’s utter horror, the northern king abruptly straightened and leaped at the autarch, far more swiftly than the paramount minister would have imagined a man Olin’s age could move. The guards were caught completely by surprise as the northerner drove whatever he held in his hand into the autarch’s belly. The weapon shattered.

Olin fell back, holding the broken end of a long, jagged shard of stone in his hand. For a moment Vash was terrified to see blood around the northerner’s fist where he clutched the broken stone blade, but then realized with relief that the dripping darkness came from King Olin’s own hand.

Olin cursed in a broken voice and staggered back. All three of the guards had their weapons out and aimed now, two with rifles, one with a matchlock pistol that only the autarch’s most senior guards were allowed to carry. More guards hurried up and likely would have beaten the northerner to death on the spot, but Sulepis stopped them.

“Do not harm him. I am well,” the autarch announced. He pulled aside a fold of his robe to display the padded, sleeveless shirt beneath. “It is a pity you did not study our people more carefully, Olin.” Sulepis appeared unmoved, even amused, as though a jagged piece of stone had not just been driven into his midsection. “On the Day of Fire, the autarch must dress like a high priest of Nushash, which means he must wear all the vestments, outer and inner.” He chortled with childlike glee. “I will not complain about having to wear such hot undergarments again!”

Olin dropped the piece of broken stone, then turned and ran toward the place where the cavern floor dropped away into darkness. The Leopard guard with the pistol took aim at his back but again the autarch stopped him.

“He can go nowhere. He knows that. Let him have his moment of freedom.”

The guard reluctantly dropped the weapon to his side, and they all watched as the king of Southmarch halted at the edge of the abyss. He looked down for a long moment, then turned back to the Golden One and the guards. “You have a demon’s luck, Sulepis. I have waited long for that chance, but your god must be watching you.”

“Oh, he is watching,” the autarch said again, still laughing. “But he is watching because he fears me!” He gestured toward Olin. “And now, little king, what will you do next?”

“The one thing you cannot prevent.” The northerner was disheveled, pale, and sweating, all his recent ill-health plain on his face and in his labored breathing. “I am going to take my own life. I need only step back one pace. Then you will see how far your plans go without any of Sanasu’s blood to make your filthy charms with!”

Vash did not doubt from the look on Olin’s face that he would carry through on his threat. He felt a moment of unexpected hope. If Olin Eddon dies, then perhaps our master will give up this mad plan of his. Perhaps we will be able to return to Xand—to a life worth living.

But the autarch seemed quite undisturbed. “Oh, Olin, this is a fine comedy. Like something played here during your Zosimia festivals, is it not?”

“I am no longer listening to you and your madness and your tricks.” The northerner was at the very edge of the pit—he did not even need to step back again to fall, only lean too far. Nobody would be able to prevent it.

“No trick. Rather, just like your comic tales, it is all a matter of timing. If you had made this threat yesterday or the day before, you would have posed a serious problem for me. But today ...” Sulepis chuckled again and shook his head. “Oh, wait until you see how your own gods have cursed and betrayed you!”

“What are you talking about?”

Sulepis turned and whispered something to one of the half dozen guards hovering nearby. The man turned and went back to the autarch’s magnificent, gold-stitched tent. “You have made one small misjudgment, Olin. That is no mean tally, but it is one more than you could afford to make. You see, it is not particularly the blood of Sanasu the Weeping Queen I must have, it is the blood of her ancestor, the god Habbili—the one you northerners know as Kupilas the Crooked.” The autarch smiled at the king’s growing look of dismay. “The god spread his seed a bit more widely than only among the Qar, you see. For one thing, he lived long on Mount Xandos among his enemies, and in that time fathered a child or two upon mortal women. Or perhaps it was upon goddesses or demi-goddesses, and they in turn mated with mortals—it does not matter. In Xand we have always heard tales of the survival of Habbili’s bloodline. My priests and I eventually proved those rumors right… and that is why, since last night, you are no longer the only key that will open Heaven’s door. Look!”

The guard was returning with the girl, who had been dressed like one of the Brides from the Seclusion. He brought her to Sulepis and pushed her roughly to her knees beside the walk-board slaves.

“You will remember Qinnitan of the Hive, I think, King Olin,” the autarch said, as if introducing them to each other at a state banquet. “You see her now as we first saw her, with the mark of her bloodline visible in her hair.” He bent and reached out a long arm to pull the girl’s hair back; a streak of fiery orange-red ran through the shining fall of black like a wound. “So you see, you may throw yourself to your death if you wish, Olin Eddon. I will miss these last hours of your conversation, but now that I have her, I no longer need you or your blood.”

The northern king looked from the triumphantly grinning autarch to the dull-eyed girl. “Ah, it’s you, child,” Olin said. “I was right—there was something about you, after all.”

She only looked at him and then back to the autarch, face full of sullen terror.

After a moment Olin lifted his hands. “I surrender. You can do with me what you will, Sulepis. I ask you a boon, however. I will go to my death without struggle if you promise you will spare the girl. She is only a child!”

“A child with very, very old blood,” said the autarch. “But you are in no position to make demands, Olin.”

The girl looked up, and for the first time seemed to understand what was going on. Her eyes, already large and dark, widened as she saw Olin on the precipice. “Go!” she shouted, and then, as if to make it clear she did know what was happening, added, “Go, die! Be free!”

But instead of heartening him, these words seemed to take the last strength out of Olin Eddon. He sagged to his knees, letting the broken piece of stone fall from his hand, and did not move as the guards dragged him away from the edge and then quickly tied his hands behind his back.

“Do not harm him, but put him back under lock and key.” The autarch smiled at Vash. “We cannot reward him for bad behavior, of course.”

“Is there nothing to which you will not stoop?” Olin asked the autarch as they marched him past. “To hide behind a child… !”

“I would murder a million children to reach what is mine,” Sulepis said calmly. “That is why I will be a god when you and your country-men have disappeared into the dust of the past.” Vash must have betrayed something with his expression, because the autarch pointed at the old courtier as if to drive the lesson home. “A million children, my old friend—ten million! It makes no difference. I would destroy everything that lived without a second thought, if it brought me my heart’s desire.”

Vash invented an errand and left soon after. The autarch, who was discussing the push into the depths beneath the castle with his officers, did not seem to notice his departure.

Matt Tinwright had thought he could sink no lower—that his days living at Hendon Tolly’s side, kept at the lord protector’s beck and call, forced to watch and even participate in some of Tolly’s more disturbing pastimes, had pulled him down so far nothing could ever shock him again. He had been wrong.

It was bad enough he had to carry young Prince Alessandros, who had been squirming and crying all the way across the residence; Tinwright could not imagine what he would have done if he had been forced to keep Queen Anissa restrained, a task that had fallen to the two guards after they had taken the child. She fought and shrieked in their arms, but the upper floors of the residence might as well have been deserted: as the group made its way down the hall no one even opened a door to look out at what was happening. Tinwright could only guess that they had become familiar with the sound of distressed women being dragged across the residence at night.

But why am I helping this monster? he thought. Nobody knows better than I do what a mad beast he is. I should find a way to kill him, even if I die myself making it happen.

But that was just the problem: Matthias Tinwright did not want to die. Not even to rid the world of a murderous piece of offal like Hendon Tolly. In fact, he was so terrified of the lord protector that he couldn’t convince himself he would succeed even if he somehow steeled himself to do it. Tolly would survive, somehow, and he would go out of his way to make Tinwright’s death long and painful.

So instead you’ll go along with him? he asked himself. By Zosim’s lyre, what kind of man are you?

A coward. There was no reason to lie—Tinwright was talking only to Tinwright, after all. A coward who wants to live. Besides if I die, who will take care of Elan? Who will keep her from falling back into Tolly’s clutches?

But it wasn’t really Elan, he knew. Coward—that was the true shape of it. No sense in pretending otherwise.

Queen Anissa was struggling with the guards again, trying to reach Tinwright and the child. “Sir!” she cried to Tinwright, “Sir, I know you not, but you have a kind face. Will you let at least me carry him? Please, sir! He is frightened, the poor, dear little lamb.” She strained toward the red-faced, weeping baby. “Let his mama hold! Let me… !”

Matt Tinwright felt as if he might be ill. What could the harm be, after all? Why shouldn’t Anissa hold the baby?

Because she might kill the child instead of letting Tolly have him, he told himself, and was horrified not only to be able to conceive of such a thing, but to know it was true and he had to act on it. Come now, he told himself, as if another member of the crowd of Matt Tinwrights had shouldered forward to have a say. If you hold onto the baby, you can keep it safe. No telling what this hysterical woman might do.

“Please, sir, please!” Her tone changed, grew louder and more desperate as they approached Tolly’s chambers. “Oh, by the gods, by the holy Three,” she began to screech, “and our lady Zoria and all the demons in the deeps, curse this monster for stealing my baby! Curse him!”

And the worst thing was that he did not know which monster she meant, Hendon Tolly or himself, and he could not find much difference between the two.

“Why do you act like this, my queen? Why do you make such a clamor? No one will hurt your baby. Go back to your rooms.” Hendon was smoother and more composed than the last time Tinwright had seen him. He had bathed and put on a clean doublet and hose; except for a certain feral quality in his stare and his ceaseless pacing and gesticulating, he almost seemed the old Hendon Tolly again.

Anissa was trying her hardest to believe the lies he was telling her, but she was not finding it easy. “Why take him from me, Lord Tolly? Why such treating of me, who always gives you kind words and… kind help?” Her accent, thick at the best of times, had become nearly impenetrable. “Just give back him and I bring when you need him.”

“But I need him now, sweet Anissa.” Hendon smiled, but he was clearly out of patience with her. He held the baby awkwardly, like a fastidious scholar who had been handed a mud-spattered pig. “Enough talk, now. Go back to your chambers and I promise I will soon bring him to you, safe and sound.”

“But why do you take him? For what?” She tried to smile back, but it was agonizing to see how poorly she did it. “You cannot need such a little one!”

“Ah, but I do, my queen, and you must trust me. Have I not helped you since your husband was taken from you? Have I not guided you during these most difficult times, and sworn to you that Alessandros here would follow in his father’s footsteps?”

“But why do you need my baby?” She pulled free of the guard who held her arm and threw herself down onto her knees in front of Hendon Tolly. It was painful to watch, like a sick drunkard begging for a last cup.

“Enough. I do not have time to explain everything. Go back to your rooms, Anissa.” Tolly’s already scant tolerance was fraying fast. The imposture—his attempt to seem ordinary and composed—was already falling apart.

“No!” She crawled rapidly toward him and threw her arms about his legs. “Please, Hendon! I beg you! Not this thing! Not my Sandros!”

“For the love of all the gods, will you simpletons get this woman off me!” Tolly shoved her away with his foot, fighting to keep a grip on the young child, who was squirming and crying again. He managed to get his heel against the queen’s shoulder and kept her at bay that way, although she wept and tried to get to him. At last the guards pried her loose and dragged her to her feet, then had to hang on as she shrieked and fought to get to Tolly again.

“Take her away,” he said. “Lock her in her rooms—no, she will raise a fuss there that will put the cat amongst the mice for certain. Lock her in the strongroom on the next floor. Feed her and see that she is tended to—she may have one maid, a young one—but I do not want to see her again until I call for her.”

The guards dragged the queen out of the room. It was not easy, even though Anissa was a small, slender woman, because she fought them every step of the way, and even with Tolly’s orders, the guards still could not bring themselves to be rough with the king’s wife.

When they were gone and the echoes of the woman’s wretched cries had finally faded, Tolly set the child down on his bed where it kicked and wailed.

“Do you know anything about changing a child’s smallclothes?” Tolly asked him suddenly.

“Sire?” Tinwright had not been expecting this.

“The creature stinks. I am sure it needs cleaning. We shall have to find a woman who can do it.” The lord protector shook his head in disgust. “My library is small—I am not going to share it with that ghastly stench.”

“Library, my lord?”

“We have incantations to speak, potions to prepare and serve to this little beast,” Tolly said with a look of distaste toward young Alessandros Eddon. “Okros explained it to me, although I do not remember everything he said. No matter! You are a scholar too… of sorts. We have all his books and papers. We have a day or so before the autarch’s bloody Midsummer Night—plenty of time. The magical royal blood is already there, after all.” He gave a sudden laugh—long, loud, and harsh. “Yes, the little beast is simply full of the stuff!”

28. Better Than Expected

The fighting as the funderlings were forced back through the Maze was as bad as anything Ferras Vansen had ever experienced. He had been terrified facing the Qar, he had been confused and despairing almost his entire time behind the Shadowline, and of course his earliest fighting, raids that his old commander Donal Murroy had led against bandit chieftains in the Southmarch countryside, had been terrifying precisely because they were the first time he had faced opponents trying to kill him—but this was different than all of them. Most of it was siege work, breast against breast, shield against shield, a sweaty, slippery, exhausting struggle where a moment’s loss of concentration could cost your life. In some spots the ranks were so tightly packed that men were killed next to him but could not fall down until he and his Funderlings finally retreated; other times Vansen and his comrades remained tangled with the very Xixian soldiers they had killed and could not shove the bodies away until the southerners fell back. It was a disturbingly intimate war: because of the darkness and close quarters archers became almost entirely useless, so most of the struggle was with men you could touch and smell and see… if not see well. The bearded, desert-browned faces of the Xixians, their conical helmets and armor of overlapping plates, began to seem almost as familiar as those of the little men who fought beside him. Together, the two sides moved deeper and deeper into the earth, twined like courtiers engaged in a complicated dance. The defenders gave ground, and the attackers pressed them, so that sometimes it seemed to Vansen the entire struggle was only some complicated way of worshiping great Kernios, lord of death and darkness.

Has ever a stranger war been fought? he wondered to himself. And by more bewildered combatants?

After hours of bloody fighting, Vansen’s men were able to use their dwindling supply of blasting powder to drop a large section at the front of the Maze onto the autarch’s army, utterly blocking the central chamber known as the Initiation Hall with the rubble of collapsed walls, and thus closing the only route through the Maze. After retreating a safe distance, the defenders were able to snatch some much-needed rest as the Xixians labored to dig their way through the shattered stone that barred their path.

“But I need to know more!” Vansen told Brother Flowstone, one of the monks who had come to fight with the other Funderlings. With many of the Maze’s corridors now cracked and in danger of collapse, he had pulled his men all the way back to a wide, low chamber called the Revelation Hall where the young Funderlings spent the end of their vigil before finally being given a sight of the Shining Man. “Why can’t you tell me the names of these tunnels?” Vansen continued. “It’s the one thing Chert didn’t put on his map. With so many different ways to choose, we might even be able to attack the southerners from behind or from the side!”

“Because these tunnels do not have names!” A broken nose and several long cuts disfigured Flowstone’s youthful face. “I told you, Captain, we Brothers only learn the steps of the maze by heart so that we can pass through it and lead the celebrants. We do not learn the names of each back-around and blind pass. Don’t you understand, Captain? We Funderlings didn’t build this place.”

Vansen was astounded. “You didn’t? Then who did?”

Flowstone shrugged. “Perhaps the Qar. Perhaps your gods—the same gods that this mad southern king wishes to bring back to life. In a way, we are all strangers here.”

Ferras Vansen tried to rest, but as had happened so many times on this retreat, he got up after a short, ragged sleep and wandered through the makeshift camp, watching over his men and wishing he could do more for them. Too many dead had been left behind; here too many were wounded and in need of care. For a while Vansen lingered to watch some of the Funderlings building walls across the narrower end of the broad chamber so they would have some cover when the time came to retreat from the Revelation Hall—if any men were still left to retreat.

His heart heavy, Vansen wandered back to his own fire. “Gods! This will drive me mad!” he said. “We have used all but the last of our blasting powder. When they dig through this fall of rubble, we will have no other way to hold them back but our sinews and blades. Why did we say yes to Chert’s cursed plan—how much blasting powder will be wasted up above… ?”

“Might as well calm yourself, Captain,” Jasper told him. “What the Elders decree the rest of us will see.”

“But we need only hold them back for a day or two more, and it will be too late for the autarch’s lunatic scheme!” Vansen was nearly beside himself with frustration. “Am I wrong about the day, Copper?”

“We may not have had enough water to drink,” said Malachite Copper said, “but we have kept the water-clock damp as a ferret’s nose.” He shook his head sadly. “Up in Funderling Town they will be lifting a cup to Midsummer’s Eve.”

“Gods bite me. What do people who live in a dark cave care about summer?” Vansen asked pettishly.

At that moment, Cinnabar’s son Calomel came running through the camp. He was a great favorite, but the men were so weary and downhearted that few of them even bothered to look up as he passed. If they had, they would have seen his dirty face streaked with tears.

“Captain! Come quick!” he cried. “Hurry! Bring men! My father needs you at Initiation Hall!”

“What?” Vansen jumped to his feet. “But he only went back to look after the ones pushing rubble into the tunnel ...”

“The Xixies have used blasting powder of their own!” Calomel said, tugging Vansen back across the camp. “They have knocked down an entire wall of the Maze and they have trapped my tada!”

“Perin’s beard!” Vansen said, “I feared this. The autarch has finally decided he is tired of making his way inch by inch! Copper—bring your men. Sledge, you and Dolomite get the rest up and moving after us ...”

“Hurry!” shouted the boy. “Hurry—oh, they will kill him! They will kill my tada!”

Vansen could think of no words to console the child. He had hoped the southerners would not break through until at least tomorrow. Was this the end, then? Had the Funderlings fought so long and hard for nothing? Cinnabar deserves a better death than to die alone, whatever else happens, he thought. If we must go down, let it be with our hands filled by our sword hilts. He was fearful for his comrade, but also felt a wild sort of optimism that had nothing to do with the truth of things. Let be what will be, he thought as he raced after little Calomel. The gods alone know a man’s end. If it had not been for the terrified boy, he would have shouted it out loud. As my father used to say about his ancestors… if you’re not a coward, a good death beats a bad life any time!

Briony had captured perhaps an hour of hard-earned sleep, but the shock of seeing her brother still dizzied her as she pulled her boots back on and staggered to her feet. What could have happened to him? How could Barrick simply walk away from her as though they meant nothing to each other—as though their lives growing up together in Southmarch had never happened? She felt as though her heart had been pierced by one of the battle’s arrows, that she had been murdered but no one had told her to lie down.

It was still dark out, but all around her the Temple Dogs and their followers were hastily tearing down what little camp they had bothered to raise. The beach was covered with torches. At least one seemed to be pushed into the sand beside every one of the long, low boats that had been grounded along the shore of the bay, so that Briony felt as though she passed through a forest of light. Dozens of Skimmer men waited beside the boats, many of them in armor made (as far as she could tell) of pungent dried fish skin, carrying bows and long forks and spears—weapons that she thought looked better suited for spearing sharks.

But these Skimmers had done more than their share, she realized, and far more than simply killing a few southern soldiers. The firing of the autarch’s fleet, some of which still burned out on Brenn’s Bay, little left above the waterline but charred, sparking hulks, was a deed that might mean everything in the hours ahead.

Eneas strode across the sand. “I have had men scouring the city. I feel certain now that the rest of the Xixies truly have retreated into the hills. Not a sniff of them to be found anywhere ...” He reached her side. “You look unwell, Briony.”

“How could I feel otherwise? You saw my brother act as if we did not know each other.”

The prince looked as though he didn’t know what to do. He doesn’t like problems he can’t solve, she thought, although she suspected she was being unfair. Still, just now she didn’t care. “I have seen men badly taken by war in the past, Princess ...”

“He is not mad. It is not war that has done this to him; it is that Qar woman, Saqri. She’s put a spell on my brother.” She looked around. “Where are they?”

“Gone,” said Eneas. “Back into the caves in the hills. Back into the ground beneath the castle.”

For a moment the lights of the torches and Eneas’ face and even the few stars blinking miserably behind the smoke all blurred as tears came to her eyes yet again. She dragged her fist across her lids. “No more,” she said. “No more talk. Let us get on with what we must do.”

“All is nearly ready,” he said. “I have only a few matters yet to see to ...”

“Then see to them,” she said. “Don’t fear for me, Eneas. I will not run into the bay and drown myself. I am made of sterner stuff.”

“But I never ...”

“Go on.” She turned her back on him and walked toward the waiting boats without looking back. When she reached the nearest she turned along the strand and began walking from torch to torch, trying to ignore the angry, miserable thoughts that swarmed through her weary mind like bees. The Skimmers watched her pass, eyes bulging and faces expressionless.

“Princess Briony?”

She turned and found herself before one of the armored Skimmers, although something about the fellow’s hairless face was not quite right. A moment later Briony realized that the he was in fact a she.

“Do I know you… ?” She squinted in the dim light. “Zoria’s mercy, is that you? Aren’t you Ena, the headman’s daughter?”

The girl nodded. “I am pleased you remember me, Highness. It was only a night or so that we spent in each other’s company.”

“The most frightening of my life—at least up until then.” Briony shook her head. “But what are you doing wearing armor and fighting with the menfolk?”

Ena laughed. “I might ask you the same! It seems we both wished to play a greater part in these final days.”

“Final?”

The Skimmer girl shrugged. “One way or another. Egye-Var has made that clear.” With her helmet off she was much more recognizable, her solemn, heavy-lidded eyes and her high brow reminding Briony of things and times she would have rather forgotten. “And how is Lord Shaso?” Ena asked.

That was the memory Briony had been trying to keep at bay. “Dead, may the gods rest him. He was a good man. He was killed in a fire in Landers Port, when our house was attacked.” At the will of Hendon Tolly, she felt sure; someone had to have put the local lord up to the attack. Briony was furious with Prince Eneas’ decision to let the Qar queen Saqri have her way, but at least now there was a chance Briony would meet Tolly the traitor again, preferably with them both free to settle things. She owed him something on behalf of the entire Eddon family, not to mention her own honor—she could think of no other word for it.

“I am very sorry, my lady,” Ena said. “Lord Shaso was a brave old man and always a friend to the Ocean Children.”

“To be honest, I’m surprised your people knew him so well. When he walked into your father’s longhouse it seemed as if they were old friends.”

“There are many stories to be shared, that is certain,” the girl said. “But not now, I think. We must cross the bay before dawn. At the very least, that will stop the Xixians firing on us with the guns that they were able to drag back into the hills. Do me the honor of letting me be the one to bring you back to your home.”

“Thank you, Ena. Let me go and gather up my belongings.”

Briony made her way back across the shingle to the temporary camp where Eneas and his men were making the last arrangements with the Skimmers. She supposed she should have remained—she was certainly one of Eneas’ advisers, if nothing else—but she found it too painful. The tall player Dowan Birch had told her she would speak to her father at least one more time, and she had. Could that hour in the prison tent have been the last time? And now she had found Barrick, and he had turned his back on her. Seeing the two of them again was all that had kept her going through her darkest days. Now she was near them both but could not have them. The pain threatened to overwhelm her.

I must believe I will see them again—that Heaven means for it all to come right. What else can I do?

But Briony had not convinced herself. You can go on pretending you’re living in a story, with gods and spirits watching over you, she told herself, or you can accept that you’re living in a much different sort of world—that the gods are dead or hateful, that someone else will have to save your father, and that nobody, least of all you, knows how this story will end.

Chert hurried up the narrow path, angry and frightened in equal measure. He and his workers were already hard-pressed to the point it seemed impossible that his undertaking would ever be ready, but now an urgent message had arrived from Brother Antimony insisting he come at once to the site of the digging. Half a day would be lost—more if they were unlucky.

He passed at least a dozen other Funderlings coming down from the dig, most of them pushing barrows of soil, but others on missions whose purpose he could not easily discern, and Chert began to feel a little better; at least things were still happening. At least Antimony had not let this urgent matter stop work entirely. Still, as he searched for Antimony, he took a good look around the site to make certain things were as they should be. The Funderling workers moved past, mostly in two crowded lines, one going to the site and one coming back. All of those moving away had barrows full of rock and earth to be dumped. Many of those who had already emptied their loads were returning to the nearest site carrying the newest sacks of blasting powder.

He found Antimony at the center of the workings, near the first and largest tunnel which would connect to the broad crevice leading down into the Sea in the Depths—“Chert’s Chimney,” as some of the workers had mockingly dubbed it—the Pit, as he thought of it. The End of the World. The tall monk looked harried beyond his years, but it was the identity of the two Funderlings who stood with him that hit Chert like a body blow. One was Nickel, the abbot-to-be of the Metamorphic Brothers’ temple, a humorless fellow Chert had disliked from their first encounter, but the other… the other was Chert’s own brother Nodule, magister of the Blue Quartz clan, and one of the few people in the world he could honestly say he liked less than Brother Nickel.

“Well, well, and well,” said Nodule as Chert walked up, “how fortunate it is that our father is dead. He would have been furious to see how you have scratched and marred the family name.”

“A pleasure to see you, too, brother.” Chert nodded to Brother Nickel, who only scowled back, then turned to Antimony. “I am here at your call, Brother, but I can wait if you have business with these two… worthy fellows.”

“In truth ...” Antimony began.

“We are here because of you,” Nickel said. “Or rather, because of what you are up to. What you are doing here is dangerous, and it is especially a danger to the temple. If you bring down so much stone, you will kill us all. I have decided I will not allow it. It must stop today.”

For a moment Chert could only stare at him. “What… what do you mean? Stop? Stop what?”

“This. All this.” Nickel waved at the men rolling barrows of stone and dirt. “You may not undertake such a risky project so close to the temple.”

Chert almost grabbed the man by the collar of his robe. “But… but you know why we are doing this!” Or did he? Was Chert himself going mad? He could have sworn that Nickel had sat through all the discussions, arguing bitterly against it but having to agree with Cinnabar’s decision in the end. “It may be our only chance to save ourselves! Cinnabar has put the Guild’s seal on it… !”

“Has he?” Nickel smiled unpleasantly. “I do not remember such a thing. I vaguely recall that you had some farfetched plan for using blasting powder to knock down stone and defeat our enemy, but I do not believe that Magister Cinnabar would ever agree to such madness.”

“You… you liar! You were there! You heard it all and you heard and saw Cinnabar and Vansen agree!”

“Here now!” said Nodule, his broad jaw working in indignation. “You cannot speak to Brother Nickel that way. He is an important fellow. You shame me again, Chert.”

Chert had wanted to hit his brother in the eye for years, and for a moment felt certain this was the time, but he decided that the risks were too great, the work here too important. “Others were there. Malachite Copper—he is a well-known and honorable man! And some of the other commanders.”

“Are they here now?” Nickel spread his hands. “I don’t see them. If you claim to be doing the Guild’s business, and with Cinnabar’s permission, where is the Astion?”

Chert was dumbfounded. A replica of the Astion, the star-shaped sigil of the Stonecutter’s Guild, was the ultimate arbiter of who served Funderling Town… but Nickel was right. He didn’t have one. “Cinnabar and the rest had to fall back and protect the Mysteries before he could give it to me—you know that!”

“I know nothing of the sort.” Nickel shook his head. “At the moment there is only your word for it, and the risk is far too great to trust one man’s word.”

“Especially a man like my brother,” Nodule said officiously, “who has already been called up in front of the Highwardens once for his foolish, risky behavior.” He nodded. “But since Cinnabar is not here, I am the highest-ranking Guildsman, and I rule that Nickel’s complaint is valid. No work will be done here until an Astion is produced.” He smirked. “Good luck, Chert.”

“Please, let me take you back to the temple, Magister,” Nickel said. “We are grateful to have you here, but you have had a long journey. I have a very nice old mushroom jack in my cupboard—we call it by the old name here, mykomel. You must share a cup with me.”

“It would be an honor.” Nodule’s round face flushed with pleasure. “I love a good jack! But my brother cannot join us, I’m afraid. He will have too much work to do closing down the job here.” He looked sternly at his younger brother. “But I will return, and if even one apprentice sweeper is at work here, the full weight of the Guild’s power will fall on you, Chert!”

When the monk and the magister had gone, Chert sank to the ground and put his hands on his head. “That cursed fool, my brother! And Nickel—what is he doing? He knows what we are doing here and why we are doing it! Elders know we pray it isn’t needed, but it might be our only hope.” He looked at the workers milling around in confusion and distress. “Still, it will be a terrible, mortal tragedy even if it succeeds.” He blinked. “Fracture and fissure! I cannot believe Nickel would be so short-sighted.”

Antimony sighed and sat next to him. “He is not shortsighted, I can tell you that. Nickel is the cleverest of all the Brothers. That is why, despite being young, he is going to be the abbot soon.” He chewed on his lip for a moment. “I think he doesn’t believe that Vansen and the others can win, but he doesn’t want you to succeed, either. He may be gambling that he can make some kind of peace with the invaders. ...”

“Or that Hendon Tolly will.” Chert frowned. “I cannot help wondering just how much of a liar he is. Enough to turn traitor?”

“Nickel?” Antimony was clearly surprised. “Selfish and dishonest, yes, but anything more seems hard to believe ...”

“Enough.” Chert shook his head in disgust. “There is no use trying to puzzle it out this way. We must get the Astion from Cinnabar, or my brother will shut down the work, just as he said, and then even this faint hope is lost to us. The Guildsmen have all scattered to their homes since the siege began. I could never round them up in time to have them vote a new Astion! Cinnabar is our only powerful protector, and his younger supporters are mostly fighting with him and Vansen, but my brother and his faction are not the kind to join in any war unless their own houses are threatened.” He made a growling noise in his throat. “And by the time that happens, it will be too late!” He stood up. “I’ll have to get the Astion from Cinnabar, somehow ...”

“But if you can’t round up the Guild in time, there’s no possible way you can reach Cinnabar,” Antimony said sadly. “He’s at least as far away, and there are thousands of the autarch’s soldiers between him and us.”

Chert felt like an overloaded arch; one small crack and the whole thing would tumble. “How is the work here? Would we have succeeded?”

“In what, two more days? Three?”

“According to Vansen, it might be as little as one.”

Antimony snorted. “No offense, Master Chert, but I doubt we’d have managed it. We still have several more yards of stone to cut and move in Mudstone Reach before we can lay the charges, and twice that in Last Reach. Too bad we couldn’t use blasting powder to open the holes to put in the blasting powder ...” He chuckled.

Chert’s gloom turned to a moment of pure terror. “By the Elders, Antimony, don’t even jest! If we knocked down the walls at Last Reach before we were ready ...”

“I know, I know.” The young monk rubbed his big hands together. “But I wouldn’t mind if we did it and forgot to tell Brother Nickel, I’ll confess. Does that make me a bad Metamorphic Brother, do you think?” He laughed again, but it had a morose tone. “And how are your wife and the other ladies doing?”

“Very well, actually. They surprise me.” Chert knew he should get up and try to solve some of his many problems, but he felt weak and brittle, as if all his supporting struts had burned away. “I do not think we will have corned sixty barrels worth of blasting powder by tonight, but we will be close to it. That Vermilion is at least as much of a general as her husband, if not quite so sweet-natured. She and Opal have not just the other women jumping to their drumbeat, but Ash Nitre and his men, too. Do you remember when part of the guildhall fell down a few years ago, how the men stood in lines passing stone hand to hand all through the first night? That’s what it looks like down by the ladies’ camp. Never doubt that women can sweat, Antimony.”

“I never did,” the monk said. “I come from a big family. Our mum had nine to feed, but she still always had a hand free to give me a clout on the head if she thought I was out of line.”

Chert smiled. “Ah, well. I have sat here like a lump of flint in a limestone bed for long enough. We’d better make sure things are safely secured here while I think of what to do next. Where’s Salt?” Although Antimony was Chert’s eyes and ears, Salt Nitre, Ash and Sulphur’s nephew, was the job’s foreman. “And for that matter, where’s Chaven?”

Antimony looked at him strangely. “What do you mean? Isn’t Chaven back in Powder Camp with you and the women?”

“No.” Chert felt a clutch in his chest. “Of course not. He said he was coming here to give you what help he could—told me he was too big and clumsy and would only be in the way among all those nimble little ladies. You know how he talks. Didn’t he come here?”

“Never.” Antimony shook his head emphatically. “We have fewer than a hundred men here, all of them retired Guildsmen. We take our meals together here and we sleep each night back at the temple. I’ve seen no sign of Chaven either place and he’s hard to miss, being twice as tall as the rest of us. He’s been gone since the Xixians invaded our tunnels.”

“By the Elders,” Chert groaned. “He is wandering lost down in the depths somewhere, with the autarch’s men all around, and those horrible clawed monsters, and… and ...”

A sudden, even more frightening thought occurred to him: Chaven had been acting strangely since he had come to Funderling Town—perhaps his obsession with the mirror had turned him traitor. Perhaps the physician had sold his allegiance to the one man who could help him get the mirror back, the mirror that he yearned for like a drunkard craved mossbrew. Perhaps even now he was taking news of Vansen’s and Cinnabar’s plans—and even of Chert’s own farfetched scheme—to their greatest foe, the Autarch of Xis.…

“He wouldn’t do that ...” Chert said quietly, mostly to convince himself.

“What did you say, Master Blue Quartz?” Antimony asked. “You don’t look well. Should I get you something to drink?”

“No, no.” Chert’s skin was cold with sudden fear. “Nothing for me. I don’t think I could keep anything down.”

“The southern mortals will come down from the hills with the morning’s light,” Saqri said when she returned to Barrick’s tent. “They have numbers and powerful guns, and they fear their master too much to do otherwise. Most of all, they fear what he will do to them if he is victorious below but they have lost everything above.”

Barrick tried to heave himself out of the cot, but the walk down the beach had overwhelmed him. He settled for sitting upright, which made him feel less of an invalid. “What does that mean, Saqri? We fight them again?”

“It means we must not be here. Otherwise, we will be fighting a pointless battle for nothing more important than the honor of the Xixians when the true danger is below. How is your strength?”

“I can walk if I go slowly.” He paused, troubled. “My sister. That was my sister.”

“I saw her, yes.”

He didn’t remember how he had once felt, that was the problem, but he knew he did not have those feelings anymore. “She was unhappy with me. Why?”

“Perhaps because you are no longer the child she remembered and that frightens her. Perhaps because you have found newer and greater responsibilities, or have changed in other ways she cannot understand.” Saqri’s dispassion was so complete it almost looked studied. “Who can say?”

“It bothers me, and I don’t know why. I feel as though I’ve lost something important. Left something behind ...”

The minute downturn of her lips was a frown. “Do not waste your thought on it, Barrick Eddon. We have more than enough to do. The southerners have a long lead on us—in fact, they have almost reached the deepest place, the very Last Hour of the Ancestor.”

He did his best to shake off the mood brought on by seeing his sister. What could it matter now, when the People’s last moments were at hand? “But it seems so hopeless—you told me that the ritual, the spell, whatever foul thing it is that the autarch seeks to do, is meant to happen tomorrow ...”

“One moment after midnight,” Saqri said. “When the year begins to die.”

“How can we possibly stop him before then? He has thousands of men in the caverns. You sent our only allies away, my sister and those Syannese, to fight in the castle against other mortals. Why? What chance will we have now?”

“No chance at all, of course.” Still the impassive mask. “But we have many other important things to concern us. I myself must choose what to do with my death.”

For a moment he thought he had not heard her. When he spoke, his skin was prickling. “Your… death?”

“It is hard to explain, but I think there will be no small power in the death of half the Fireflower. Perhaps not enough to change the outcome of such an uneven fight, but perhaps at least enough to thwart the autarch in some way. But if I am not there to employ it, my death will avail nothing.”

He swallowed. “And me… ? Do I have this… death to give, too?”

She made the gesture The Book is Closed, a Qar equivalent of a shrug. “What I speak of has never happened before. Always when one of my ancestors died in battle their heirs were primed to take the Fireflower. Now, who knows? I die with no living issue. As for you… ?” Saqri shrugged. “Nothing like you has ever been heard of, not by the Fireflower, not even among those of the Deep Library.” Her smile looked like the bared teeth of a wolf. “Still, I would advise you not to sell your own passing lightly, either.”

He nodded, pushing away the mote of disquiet which meeting his sister had left in him. “So we fight. And we almost certainly die.” It seemed so simple and so final—but also so terrifying. “Not knowing if we have won or lost. Not knowing what happened to Qinnitan.”

“It is possible we will find your southern girl before the end.” Saqri did not quite seem to approve. “As for the rest, we will lose, of course—that is certain. In the whole of our world there is no longer enough Qar… magic left, as you would call it, to save us. But you and I still have work of our own to do. For better or for worse, my husband chose you to carry the Fireflower of the kings into this final battle. That is why I gave you the armor that once belonged to my son, Janniya. It did not save him. He died here in Southmarch at the hands of your ancestor, but to me he was noble and lovely beyond even the gods themselves.” She put her hand upon his. “Will you fight with me, Barrick Eddon?”

Barrick felt strangely empty, like a pottery vessel cleansed by fire. All the things he had worried about for so long, loved so hopelessly, now seemed to have vanished; he could scarcely remember them.

He nodded slowly. “I’ll fight with you, Saqri, yes. You’re all the family I have, now. And when the time comes, I’ll die with you, too, if the gods grant it.” He did his best to smile, but it had become an unfamiliar exercise. “After all, it will be a better ending than what I’ve always expected.”