by Tad Williams
“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
“The great god Perin destroyed Khors Moonlord, his daughter’s ravisher, after Khors himself slew the war god Volios. With the death of these two great gods, the fighting ended . . . ”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
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 h
im. 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.
