by Tad Williams
“Everybody to the back of the hall!” he said, pitching his voice to be heard by as many as possible. As the farthest who could hear him called to those who could not, Vansen added, “Douse any torches and get everyone behind the first barricade. We’ll make our stand there.”
Jasper grinned tightly and looked at the monk Flowstone, who appeared more than a little queasy at the prospect. “We will indeed,” the wardthane said. “We’ll give ’em something they’ll be talking about in Funderling Town and Xis itself for many a year!”
Fear ran through the hall like a ripple on a pool, but no one hesitated; within only moments they were moving in a ragged but orderly way toward the foremost barricade.
Flowstone looked up at Vansen, and his mouth trembled. “We’re all going to die in this hall, aren’t we?” he said quietly. “The same place where I was initiated—the place where I became a man.”
“Nobody knows when their time has come or what the gods plan.” Vansen shrugged. “Least of all now, when even the gods seem baffled. A year ago I thought I’d certainly die behind the Shadowline. That didn’t happen. Who knows what comes next, Brother Flowstone? Only the Sisters of Fate. Tighten your helmet strap and have a sip of water. You probably won’t have a chance at another for a while.”
Pinimmon Vash had no idea what to expect of the event. It seemed like one of his master’s typical whims—some sort of ceremony, apparently religious, but with a full slate of the autarch’s Leopard guards in attendance. Vash made certain that Panhyssir was informed so that the sanctuary would be ready.
To Vash’s inestimable relief, the northern king for once was nowhere to be seen. The girl with the red streak had been removed from the chamber as well, so that only the shrine of Nushash remained of things that might steal attention from the autarch—not that anything could truly compete with Sulepis. In his ceremonial golden armor and high-crested falcon helmet the tall ruler indeed seemed something far beyond a mere man. The autarch’s eyes even seemed to catch and reflect back something of the smoldering torches, shining almost orange beneath his crown’s golden beak. Two dozen of the autarch’s Leopards stood before, beside, and behind him, making a sort of human cage that briefly gave Vash a bizarre glimpse of the autarch imprisoned. Yet Sulepis stood nearly a head taller than even the biggest of them: the cage of men seemed scarcely enough to contain him.
Vash didn’t know himself what the autarch was planning. He had fulfilled all that was expected of him, and now waited with ragged nerves to discover it. He sometimes thought it must be the same to be a bird as to serve a capricious, deadly master like Sulepis. The winds shifted, a warm updraft became a downdraft that hurled you toward the earth, and all you could do was fight to keep your wings out and pray you would level out once more.
The autarch called out to the Leopard guard officer. “Did you bring them, as I bade you? Are they here?”
He bowed, shaved head gleaming with oil. “Waiting outside, Golden One.”
“Good. Send them in to me now.”
Two Leopards went out. The rest of the guards did their best to remain at strict attention, but they were clearly curious as to who might be such a risk that so many guards were present at once. Soon, three large women were led into the sanctuary. They were all Xixian, by appearance, and each woman was as tall and heavyset as almost any of the Leopards; also, all three were hard-eyed and sullen. The guards’ eyes grew wide to see them. Some of them must have wondered whether the autarch planned one of his strange jokes.
Sulepis waved his long, gold-tipped fingers and the desert priest A’lat appeared bearing a box of carved ivory. At a nod from Sulepis and despite his blind appearance, the priest walked directly to each of the women in turn and gave her something from the box. As the priest returned to the autarch’s side, Vash saw that each of the muscular women now held something that looked like a piece of dull crystal about the same size as a honey-sweet.
“You are Khobana the Wolf, are you not?” the autarch asked the tallest woman, whose hair was chopped shorter than that of most men. “The one who was sentenced to execution for killing her husband and family?”
A sort of sneer curled her lip. “Yes, Golden One.”
“I remember you. With your bare hands, yes?” He nodded, pleased. “Now, you three each hold a great gift—one that will make you as fearsome a fighter as one of the gods themselves, as powerful as Xosh the moon god who slew Okhuz, the god of war. And if you survive to return it . . . it will also buy your freedom.”
The women stared at him, mistrustful as wild animals. Vash was unsure of what was happening, but he could not help remembering that as powerful as Xosh Silvergleam had been, he had been slain in turn by another, stronger god. It was something Pinimmon Vash thought about more and more, these days: the servants of the powerful often came to a bad end—and nobody mourned them. . . .
The autarch had continued. “. . . And although in ordinary times such weak resistance would mean nothing—less than nothing—because I now have need of haste I cannot allow these mongrel Yisti and their March-man general to balk me any longer. That is why you hold those kulikos stones in your hands.”
Kulikos? Vash shivered. He had heard enough of the old stories to know such powerful magicks would bring death to many—and eventually, to their bearers as well.
As he warmed to his subject, the autarch’s voice rose and echoed. “With the stones and the spells A’lat has taught you, you will be true she-demons! You will tear my enemies apart as if they were mice and rabbits, and they will run weeping before you. You will leave nothing in your wake but blood, and when the sun has passed through the sky one more time in the world above, I will stand before the god himself and make his power mine. And you three will be among my most honored servants!”
Khobana the Wolf was the first of the women to drop to her knees. “Hail, Sulepis!” she said. “Hail, Golden One!” The other two echoed her cry.
“Hail, indeed!” the autarch said, laughing.
31
The Gate to Funderling Town
“. . . Zuriyal told her brother Zmeos that the strange smell in the great house was only that of a mouse that had snuck in to get out of the cold.”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
“IT’S FOOLISH and I won’t let you do it,” Brother Antimony told him. “With all respect, Master Chert, I can’t. Cinnabar and the rest would never forgive me.” He blanched. “Oh, Elders, and think of what Mistress Opal would do! She’d have my hide for a cleaning rag!”
“Unless you’re planning to tie me up and sit on me, young man, you can’t stop me.” He scowled. “Don’t make it harder. Do you think I’m not terrified?”
“But . . . but it’s a war up there!”
“It’s a war down here, too. Our friends are fighting and probably dying this moment. I owe it to them to do what I can.”
“But what makes you think Brother Nickel will listen to you anyway? He is stubborn, Chert, and he hates you.”
“He won’t listen to me—but he’ll listen to the Astion.” He finished tying his pack closed and stood up, slinging it over his shoulders. “Nickel is a nasty piece of work, but he is not a traitor. Neither is my brother, much as I dislike him. And they have Guild Law on their side.” It still galled, though, the way his older brother Nodule, the clan magister, had walked in and immediately taken Nickel’s side. “No, if we want to be ready to save our people, we will have to do it the correct way, the Funderling way—with all permits correctly chopped and filed.” He patted the big youth on the arm. “Keep the work going any way you can, Antimony. Work in secret if you can. They will likely not bother you if I’m gone, and I’ll make sure they hear about it.”
“But what about your wife and son . . . ?”
“I’ll deal with them, lad. Cinnabar and the others are down in the depths facing certain death. I can at least have the courage to tell Opal what I plan to do, face-to-face.”
<
br /> Antimony clasped Chert’s hand with the worried look of someone sending a friend off to nearly certain death.
“You what? Of course you will not! In fact you will have to walk over me to get out this door.” Opal threw herself across the doorway of her temporary quarters beside the gunflour-works. The women who shared it with her had all slipped out when they heard the first of Chert’s words, sensing the storm that was brewing—even the redoubtable Vermilion Quicksilver. Chert wished he could have followed them.
“It’s no good, my old darling,” he said with a stern resolve he did not feel. “I have no choice. I’ve told you why. If I wait any longer, it will be too late.”
“All the more reason. It was a wild, dangerous plan to begin with, so why risk your life for it?” She folded her arms across her breast. She wasn’t going to budge without a fight, that was clear. In that moment he loved her for it even as he began to wonder whether he would have to knock her senseless to escape.
“Just listen to me, my love,” he begged.
“No and no and no . . . !” She broke off, distracted. Flint had wandered out of the back of the cavern rubbing his eyes, his hair still mussed from sleep. “Oh, child, were we shouting?” she said in a completely different tone. “Go back to sleep. Mama will be in soon. I’m just having a little discussion with your wicked, wicked Papa.”
“Let him go, Mama Opal. I . . . I dreamed about it. The Shining Man was on fire—it was hot as the sun! Everybody was screaming. Let him go.”
“What nonsense is this?” Opal frowned and tried to turn him around. “You had a bad dream, child. Back to bed.”
“No.” He held firm. He was bigger than Chert now, almost the size of the young giant Antimony, and could not be so easily moved. “Papa Chert has to go.”
Chert took a few steps forward and touched Opal’s arms. “The boy has been right before . . . about many things.”
Her expression was not of anger but naked terror. “No! Not again! I won’t let you go off again. Do you know what it’s like for me . . . ?”
Chert shook his head. “I can only guess. But I know that you miss me like I miss you.” He took another step, put his arms around her even though she stiffened in his embrace and turned her face away. “Please, my only love, don’t make this so hard for me. I would not do it if I didn’t feel I had to, but lives and more depend on me—perhaps all of Funderling Town!”
She pulled herself away but kept her back to him. “Then just ... just go. But do not expect me to weep quietly and wave farewell like some dutiful wife out of a story. Go and be cursed!”
“No!” The thought horrified him. “Don’t send me away with that on my head, Opal.”
“Get out.” She shrugged off his embrace, slapped at his hands when he tried to touch her again, and still would not meet his eye. “Go!”
He kissed the boy on the forehead, ran his hand through the child’s flaxen hair, then left the makeshift dwelling and turned toward Funderling Town. Opal was right about one thing—it would be a long and dangerous trip, with the Earth Elders only knew what kind of monsters and enemies between him and his destination. He felt as if he waded through chest-deep water, his feet sticking and sliding on a muddy bottom.
“Wait! Chert, wait!”
He turned to see Opal leaping up the path behind him, the hem of her skirt clutched in her hands so she didn’t trip. Before he could say a word, she reached him and threw her arms around him, squeezing her small, compact body against his so tightly that for a moment he lost his breath.
“I take it back, I take it all back,” she said through tears. “I take back what I said! You are my man, Blue Quartz, and I love you. But if you let something happen to you then I will put a curse on you that will make you hop and jump like a rat with fleas even as you stand in front of the Elders themselves! I swear it!”
He did not waste breath trying to come up with anything to say to that, but only held her for a long time. After they finally kissed and murmured their good-byes Opal turned and went back down the path without looking at him again.
Any hopes Briony might have had of a swift conquest of her family home did not survive the first hours of their incursion. Hendon Tolly’s loyalists, caught by surprise when Briony and Eneas arrived at the outer wall in the middle of the burning of the autarch’s ships, quickly dropped back to the inner keep. Berkan Hood and his soldiers pressed hundreds of castle folk into involuntary service, forcing them to hoist cannons rescued from the Qar’s attack up to the top of the inner keep’s walls, and by the time the sun rose on Briony’s first morning back in Southmarch, those guns had begun to boom from the towers of Raven’s Gate.
“We have our own demi-cannons atop Basilisk Gate and the outer walls,” Eneas said as they sheltered with his lieutenants in a merchant’s tall house on the North Lagoon. From the window of the uppermost room they could see the smoke of the guns curling along the top of Raven’s Gate, but at the moment Hood and his defenders didn’t seem to know where their enemies were and were firing wildly. The morning air off the ocean was warm and damp and salty as blood; the weather seemed to have changed from spring to late summer in a day. “We could leave some of them in place against a return by the autarch’s troops and have the rest brought to bear on the inner keep by tonight.”
Briony shook her head. “Tolly has surrounded himself with innocents. I won’t fire on my own people.”
Eneas nodded. “I sympathize, Princess. Perhaps I even agree, but I am not certain you can afford too much care. If what your father told you is correct, we have only until midnight tomorrow before the autarch . . . well before he does whatever it is he plans.”
“But the autarch is deep beneath the castle. That witch Saqri told us.”
He shrugged, a pragmatic warrior out of his depths. “I am certain you remember what the fairy queen said better than I do, but I remember that she told us, ‘Every battle here matters.’ She said there were strands of danger everywhere, like a spider’s web, and that no one could know for certain which strand touched which.”
Briony loosened and retied the strip of cloth meant to keep the sweat out of her eyes. The mere thought of being ruled by the fairy queen, the creature who had stolen her brother, filled her with fury. “I don’t care. I will not turn the guns on my own people unless they have taken up arms for Tolly. But from the distance a cannon shot will travel, that’s impossible to know.”
Lord Helkis, the prince’s friend and chief commander, cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon, Princess Briony, but this is no ordinary siege. We cannot wait them out. From what we are told, Tolly has been stocking the residence with supplies for months. Do you think we can make them surrender by wagging our fingers at them?”
“Miron,” said Eneas warningly.
“No, Your Highness, it must be said.” The young nobleman turned to Briony again. “I will speak what my liege cannot, either because of his feelings or his courtesy. If the fairies are right, Princess, then you will doom your own people by this faintheartedness.”
“Miron! You go too far . . . !”
“No, Eneas.” Briony lifted her hand. “He is giving you what any good councillor should—the truth as he sees it.” She turned to Helkis. “Yes, my lord, it is a dilemma. But I will not let anyone fire willy-nilly into the heart of my castle. Tolly has gathered many of my subjects around him. Even among the soldiers, a large number of those fighting probably believe they are defending the keep against the autarch or the fairies or some other foreign invader. No, I will not return to my home and spill any blood that I needn’t spill.” She frowned at a sudden thought. How many times had her father said, “Even a good king will always have blood on his hands ...”? More than she could count. Briony had thought he meant simply that wars could not be avoided, but now she was learning the truth: Olin had been saying that almost every decision a monarch made would cause suffering for someone. “Please, let me consider this problem for a short time, if you would be so good,” she said wh
en Lord Helkis would have spoken again.
“Would you like a moment to yourself?” asked Eneas.
“That is exactly what I would like, Your Highness,” she said gratefully. “But I will not evict you from your own rooms. I will walk a little.”
“But not beyond the yard of this house . . . !”
“Of course not, Prince Eneas. You have my promise.”
She made her way downstairs past the sentries and other soldiers, bemused as always not by the way they evaporated from in front of her— Briony had been born into a royal family; she was used to deference—as by the way they steadfastly avoided meeting her eyes. This was a new thing. Only the most fearful or guilty had looked away from her before, and ever since she had reached womanhood, she had become used to men sizing her up with the unconscious insolence of horse-traders. So what had changed?
These are Eneas’ men, she realized. And they think I belong to their prince.
It was a realization that disturbed her more than it should have.
She reached the ground floor and made her way across the crowded courtyard to the gate. The merchant who owned this house had been a wealthy man—Briony believed she had met him at a few court functions, although she didn’t remember his face—and his property was large, more than adequate for Eneas and his command staff. She made her way up the stairs of the small gatehouse.
It was beyond strange seeing what had become of the outer keep in her absence, horrifying as any nightmare. The Qar’s brief invasion had all but emptied it, and though a few residents had filtered back out after the fairies had withdrawn, they had quickly found themselves under fire from the autarch’s huge cannons and so had fled back to the inner keep again.
The outer keep had once been as pretty and thriving a city as any north of Tessis, but now it seemed lifeless as a pile of charred bones. Entire buildings had toppled into spars and brickwork or burned away until only their chimneys remained, solitary as grave markers. Scarcely any of the tallest buildings still stood, and those that remained upright were blackened and deserted. Briony could not look at the wreckage without her eyes filling with tears.
