by Tad Williams
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.
