by Tad Williams
“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 famili
es 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
“Blind Aristas told the boy that his dreams had been given to him by the gods, and that the meaning of them was that an innocent must go to the house of the angry god Zmeos Whitefire and find the lost sun.”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
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 thre
e 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.
