by Tad Williams
Hammerfoot’s son spoke in a rumbling voice like a slow avalanche. “Tunnels that will lead us down to the naked wound of Crooked’s last and greatest effort, and from there to the ultimate depths, Mistress. Some of the way must still be cleared, and we will have to fight when our way crosses the autarch’s line of descent, but if we strike swiftly and work tirelessly, we may yet beat the humans to the Last Hour of the Ancestor.”
“Let it be so, then.” Saqri let out a breath, the closest thing to a sigh Barrick had ever heard from her. “Tomorrow is the last day—perhaps the last day that ever will be. Let none of us say that he or she could have given more.”
Daikonas Vo watched the parade of monsters with dull fascination. He had been stumbling in darkness for so long that the glare of their torches made him blink and shy away. What did they want? Were these truly pariki as the Xixians called them—the fairies of his own mother tongue? What were they doing here beneath the castle? He had thought the autarch had driven them all away . . .
Vo shook his head to clear away some of the confusion. Did it matter? He had been wandering in darkness for so long he could scarcely remember who he was. Only the hot pain that had spread from his gut and now ran through his entire body like poison reminded him of what had happened to him, why he still breathed and walked when everything inside him urged him to lie down and accept the sweet relief of death.
If even death would be a relief, that was. Because in the dark, lost hours Vo had begun to hear his mother’s voice again, whispering the stories of the gods to him, warning him of the serpents and other shadowy demons that would hunt him after he died and keep him from the bosom of Grandfather Nushash, the sun.
And weren’t these grotesques marching below him through the underground caverns proof that such things could and did exist even in life? Bat-winged, hyena-headed, some covered with rough scales like the lowest desert snake . . . and their eyes! Glittering, glowing eyes that burned like coals. Surely they could see him even in his stony hiding place high on the cavern wall where the narrow trail he had been following had suddenly ended, a hundred feet above the cavern floor. So many times he had almost fallen to his death in this dark, ancient hell—there must be a reason he still lived! The gods existed and had taken pity on Daikonas Vo. There could be no other explanation. And when he completed his task they would honor him. No beasts would hunt him in the dark lands of death. No serpents would devour him.
The things below had been still for a long while, immersed in some silent ritual. At last, though, they roused themselves and began to make their way farther into the depths, toward what must be the same ultimate goal as Daikonas Vo’s. He would follow them, he decided. To one who had been wandering so long in darkness even the distant light of their torches would be enough to lead him, their stealthy passage loud enough to guide him without his coming too close and being discovered.
As if to remind him what the penalty for such clumsiness would be, a burning pain made him grimace and bend himself double so that he almost tumbled from the ledge. The agony did not pass for long moments.
The girl with the red streak in her hair, the girl who had tried to murder him, was waiting in the depths. Great Sulepis was waiting there, too. Even the gods were waiting there for Daikonas Vo. He could not disappoint them.
As the pain ebbed and the last of the immortal monsters passed out of the cavern he began to climb carefully and quietly down from his high place.
After traveling for so long by dark, narrow ways that Barrick fell into a waking dream, Saqri at last signaled that it was time to make camp. For a while now they had been following a ledge around the lip of a great, nearly circular chasm that seemed only a little less wide than the old inner walls of Southmarch, and which fell away far beyond the light of any torches.
“This is the wound,” Saqri said as she stood watching her householders preparing the camp. “This is the scar of Crooked’s last struggle.”
“This? This hole?” It did not match with the Fireflower memories that drifted up through his thoughts like bubbles. “We are there . . . ?”
“No.” She moved closer to the edge. “If you dropped a stone, it would drop for long, long moments still before it rattled to the bottom. But far down, past many twists and turns of this great rift, that low place waits—the Last Hour of the Ancestor. So this is the beginning of the last part of our journey. When we have prepared, we will begin the climb down.”
“All the way to the bottom?” Barrick thought of the stone dropping and dropping through darkness and could not imagine descending such a distance. “There aren’t ropes long enough for that in the whole world!”
Saqri allowed herself a tiny smile. “We will go down a little way to the next tunnels, then use them. Later we will return to the wound again. It will take time, but at last we will reach the place where our enemies . . . and our allies . . . are gathering.” She made another gesture with her palm facing down—Water Enters Soil. “You have some little time now, manchild, so rest. I will send for you when we are ready to move on.”
He did his best to follow Saqri’s advice, but his own disquiet and the continuous murmur of the Fireflower voices made him too restless. He rose and walked among the Qar, watching them work, marveling at their different shapes and types despite the Fireflower chorus assuring him that all was ordinary and familiar. He did not speak unless one of the Qar spoke to him, still uncertain of his place among these strange and ancient people. He thought he saw resentment on many of their inhuman faces, curiosity on some others, and it occurred to him that his presence was at least as disturbing to them as it was strange to Barrick himself.
What am I? I’m certainly not their prince, but I’m no ordinary subject, either. I have the blood and the memories of all their kings inside me, but I know less about them than I know about the peasants in far-off Xis.
He made his way at last to the edge of the rift and stood a long while in silence, trying to make sense of such a great hole in the earth. How could his family have ruled this place for generations and know so little about it? Or was it only Barrick himself, hung and smoked in his own misery, who had been oblivious?
“Master?” someone asked. It was a Qar term of carefully chosen resonance—it meant not so much a leader or superior as a foreigner whose status was not yet known. Barrick turned and found a trio of goblins standing behind him, looking up with solemn, shining eyes.
“Yes?”
“We have been in the side tunnels, doing the bidding of the queen in white. While there, we smelled a man. A human man.”
For a moment he thought they were insulting him obliquely, perhaps suggesting that he bathe: the Qar were much more interested in cleanliness than Barrick’s own people, he had noticed already. “A man . . . ?”
“Yes, Lord. Like you, but different.” The goblins nudged and glared at each other, then the one who had been chosen as spokesman tried again. “Older. A little smaller. Will you come and see?”
Barrick let himself be led away from the lip of the great chasm. “What have you done to him? Is he a captive?”
The goblins looked shocked. “No, Lord!” said the spokesman. “We would do nothing without your word ...”
“The queen was busy,” said one of the others, earning a glare from the one who had been talking. “And we are frightened of the dark lady.”
“Quiet, fool,” muttered the third, but it was unclear to whom she was speaking. Only the whispered knowledge of the Fireflower allowed him to discern which goblins were male and which female.
They led him up a winding path through the Qar forces until they were just beyond the camp. Here at the edge of things, where the light of the torches was dim and the shadows long, Barrick was reminded again of how little he had seen of the sun since he had first set out on this blighted adventure.
I should have stayed under the open sky as long as I could. . . .
His thoughts were interrupted by a memory of Briony and himself as children, running al
ong the bright hillside of M’Helan’s Rock, knee-deep in white meadowqueen blossoms as the sea boomed and hissed below. The thought was as painful as a dagger, a cold stab in his heart. He felt the Fireflower memories swarm up and cover it like butterflies alighting on a bush, but for the briefest moment he had a twinge of doubt. Was the Fireflower keeping things from him, somehow? Separating him from his own life?
A moment later all such speculation vanished as another group of bare-foot goblin soldiers appeared, half a dozen at least, prodding diffidently with their slender, sharp spears at a man twice their small size. For half a moment Barrick thought it might be one of the Xixian soldiers who had become separated from his troop, but the man’s round face was as pale as Barrick’s own . . .
Barrick stared. The man stared back at him.
“My prince . . . ?” the man said at last. “Are you . . . do you . . . ? Is that truly you, Prince Barrick?”
It took longer for Barrick to remember. “Chaven,” he said at last, speaking the name out loud. His voice was dry and ragged from disuse. “What are you doing here, physician?”
“Prince Barrick—it is you!” The man stared as though newly awake; a moment later, as if something had slipped inside him and his feelings could now move freely, he suddenly lurched toward Barrick with arms wide. Barrick stepped back from the embrace. “But you are so tall, Highness!” Chaven said. “Ah, I suppose it has been almost a year ...” He shook his head. “Listen to me babble. How do you come to be here? How did you survive the war with the fairies?” He gestured to the goblins, who were watching the exchange with deep suspicion. “Are you a prisoner? No, you have made them your prisoners somehow ...”
Barrick found himself increasingly impatient with this stocky little man who would not stop talking. “I asked you what you are doing here. You are in the middle of a Qar camp and we are at war. You do not belong here.”
Chaven stared at him. “Why so cold, Highness? Why so angry? I have done nothing but good for your family in your absence—I helped to save your sister’s life!”
Barrick was awash in confusing ideas, the voices of the Fireflower and his own memories. He did not even know himself why he was angry with the physician. “I will ask you one last time, Chaven—why are you here, sneaking around on the outskirts of our camp?”
“Sneaking? I ...” The scholar shook his head, then fell silent. “I will be honest, Prince Barrick—I do not know. I . . . I confess that I am a little confused. I seem to be lost, too.” He looked around him slowly. “Yes, where am I? Last I remember I was with Chert and the others ...”
The name meant nothing to Barrick. He was about to turn his back on the man when one of the goblins pulled at his sleeve. “He is hiding something, Master. We saw it when he approached—there, under his robe. It is a little man of stone. ’Ware lest he try to hit you with it ...”
“What? Nonsense!” Chaven cried, but he seemed more baffled than offended. He wrapped his arms around his middle as if he meant to protect his belly against an attack.
“What are they talking about, Chaven? Show it to me.”
“But . . . it’s not ...” Frightened by the look in Barrick’s eyes, Chaven reached into his robe and lifted out the thing he had been hiding. It was a small statue of a man with an owl crouched on his shoulder, crudely carved in crystal that was streaked with pale pink and gray and blue. The Fireflower voices sang loud and harsh in his head, as full of confusion as Barrick himself.
“I’ve . . . I’ve seen that statue before, somewhere.” He stared at it, then glanced up to Chaven, who still looked half awake but fearful, like a man dragged out of bed into a completely unexpected situation. Then it came to him, like a fire racing through dry kindling. “It was in the Erivor Chapel at home. Someone stole it.” Barrick’s face felt as if it was someone else’s—he had no idea what expression he wore. “I stole it. And Briony and I threw it into the ocean. How could you possibly have it?”
“I don’t know, Highness!” The physician shook his head violently. “No, I do know—of course I know! The Skimmers brought it to me. Some of their oyster divers found it and . . . and they thought I might tell them if it was worth anything. I bought it from them.” He looked up at Barrick, his face full of calculation but also something deeper and stranger, a kind of animal terror. “I had never seen anything like it—an image of Kernios Olognothas, the all-seeing Earth Lord. I . . . I wanted it so very much.”
“You wanted this heavy statue of the dour god of death so much that you carry it around with you through these depths? What are you doing here under the castle at all, man? What are you hiding?”
Chaven cringed a little. “My prince, you are frightening me. I will tell you everything, I promise! Answer all your questions, yes. Just take me into your camp and give me some water to drink. I find that I am very dry. I’m not certain how long I’ve been lost in these lonely tunnels ...”
“You will do more than come back to the camp,” Barrick said. “You will meet Saqri, the queen of the fairies, and answer her questions as well. And if you are very unlucky you will also meet Yasammez. Some of them call her Lady Porcupine. She will likely make you wet yourself.”
Barrick stared hard at the physician for a moment, then thanked the goblin sentries and dismissed them. When they had scuttled away, he turned back to Chaven. “But first ...”
The physician’s mouth was hanging open. “You spoke to them—but you did not say a word that I could hear. How did you do that?”
“That doesn’t matter.” Barrick waved his hand. “First, before we go back to the camp, you will leave the statue in my tent for now. I don’t think I want Saqri and the others to know about it just yet.” He took Chaven by the elbow and directed him back along the rocky path that circled the great hole at the center of the cavern.
“I . . . I don’t understand, Highness,” said Chaven.
“No, you don’t.” Barrick gave him a little push to speed him up. “That’s because you don’t have the blood of gods and monsters running in your veins like some of us do.”
30
Slipping on Blood
“The moment he made his way inside the castle, the Orphan was discovered by the goddess Zuriyal, the sister of Zmeos the Horned Serpent. She felt pity for the child because of his youth and innocent kindness ...”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
“THE LAST HOURS are truly upon us now,”said Malachite Copper. The high-ranking Funderling was looking less handsome every hour, his armor dented and dusty, his hair wild and scorched short on one side where a flare of Xixian war fire had burned him. “When the southerners dig through all that rock we dropped in the middle of the Maze, we’ll have to make a stand. We’ve slowed them badly these last days, but once they push through here, there’ll be nowhere else we can hope to stop them.”
Vansen took a tiny sip from his waterskin. The blasting powder the Funderlings had used to block the autarch’s march as they slowly gave ground through the Maze had also cracked the stone of the ancient building’s aqueduct; they no longer had fresh water or any notion of when they would get some again. “How much longer do we need to hold them?”
“Not long” Copper said. “I looked in on the monks carrying the hour-candle a short while ago to learn the time. Midsummer’s Eve is over now, Captain. Upground, Midsummer’s Day has already dawned. Today, we will live or die, succeed or fail.”
“I wish it were such an even thing—a toss of the coin, live or die.” Vansen frowned; it made his jaw hurt where one of the Xixians had knocked his helmet off his head with a spear thrust, but he had been fortunate not to lose his eye. “But I think the chances we live to see the day after today are much smaller than that, friend Copper.”
A short distance away Cinnabar Quicksilver was tossing and murmuring in shallow sleep. He had been felled by one of the Xixians’ powder blasts in the Initiation Hall at the center of the Maze. A dozen other Funderlings
had died but Vansen and Sledge Jasper had reached the wounded magister in time to drag him and a handful of other survivors out alive. The fever that had come with Cinnabar’s wounds had been the greatest danger but it seemed finally to have broken. Now he lay on a makeshift litter here in Revelation Hall, the last roofed section of the Maze. Only the open Balcony lay behind them, then below it and beyond stretched the great open spaces of the cavern that contained the Sea in the Depths and the island of the Shining Man.
Wardthane Sledge Jasper limped over and lowered himself to the floor beside them. His face was a mask of dried blood and dirt, his hairless head crisscrossed with cuts and dappled with bruises: Vansen thought that he looked like he had been trying to knock down walls using nothing but his own hard skull.
“It’s a short walk to the end of the road,” Jasper said matter-of-factly. “I just came back.”
“The Balcony?” Vansen asked. “I know, I’ve seen it ...”
“We’ll be able to hold them less than an hour or two after they break through into this hall . . . and our spies say they’re coming soon. Hundreds and hundreds.” Jasper looked to where a group of weary Funderlings was piling stones for the last of the defensive barriers they were building across Revelation Hall. “At least we won’t have to go far when we do retreat again.”
“Vansen . . . ?” Cinnabar was awake on his litter and stretching out his hand. “Captain Vansen . . . ?”
“I’m here.” He crouched down beside the Funderling magister. One of Cinnabar’s legs was badly broken. Vansen thought that even if some miracle saved him from death at the hands of the Xixies, there was little chance the Funderling would keep the damaged limb.
