by Tad Williams
But that will do you no good, woman, she told herself. Keep your thoughts on what you need to do. Concentrate!
The problem was clear. From here on White Bank Road, she could not see much of the old walls of the inner keep, although she could see the towers of Raven’s Gate clearly enough and the shapes of soldiers atop it, scurrying like ants on a garden wall. But the inner keep’s walls were high and nowhere could they be quickly breached. Whether traitor or not, Avin Brone had always been a useful tyrant about keeping them in good condition and the gates and guard towers well staffed.
Briony couldn’t help but wonder where Brone was at that moment, and what he would do if he knew she lived. How deep did his treachery run? Had he made common cause with Tolly, or would he at least support her to get the castle back into Eddon hands? That was something to think about, if they managed to breach the walls of the inner keep: Brone didn’t know that Finn Teodoros had spilled his secrets. He didn’t know that Briony knew all about him.
But it did her no good now unless she could get word to Brone on the other side of the walls and he really would support her. After all, he might just as easily lead her and Eneas into a trap. Might Tolly have some kind of hold over him? It was so hard to know, because Brone himself was so full of shadow. “He is the man who does what I cannot,” her father had sometimes said, but never told her or her brothers exactly what he meant. Now Briony Eddon was beginning to suspect.
Thinking of Brone and his countless subterfuges reminded her of something—a night long ago, or so it seemed now, after Kendrick’s death but before everything had gone completely wrong, when he had summoned Briony and her brother to his chambers. It had been the same night Finn Teodoros had read Brone’s plans to have her family imprisoned and destroyed, but that was not what had sparked in her memory.
Father’s letter . . . ! A page of that letter had been stolen, and that night Brone had given it back to them, saying he found it among his own papers and claiming his innocence. Briony doubted that innocence now, but it was the letter itself she remembered. It had said something about protecting the drains of the inner keep because Olin feared vulnerability there. Could that help her now?
Her heart fell as she remembered that Brone had resolved the problem the king feared, covering the drains with massive iron grates whose holes were too small for even the slenderest child or slipperiest Skimmer to pass through. In fact, the Skimmers themselves had sworn to her only hours earlier that there was no way they could enter the inner keep. Her beloved father had unwittingly made certain her only chance at rescuing his throne was prevented.
Another idea came to her then—an odd idea, the sort of thing that would have Eneas frowning and doubtful, but thinking about the Skimmer-folk had brought it to her and the more she considered it the more it seemed her only chance.
She turned her back on the gate so suddenly that she bumped into one of the Syannese knights, who dropped to a knee, full of apologies. “None of that,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Sir Stephanas, Your Highness.” Like the others, he wouldn’t look directly at her. It irritated her.
“Well, go find me half a dozen of your brave fellows and tell them all to put on ordinary clothes—the deserted houses must be full of them. Then meet me here in an hour’s time.”
“Clothes . . . ? Houses . . . ?”
“Oh, dear, Sir Stephanas, I hope it is my accent that is at fault and not your brains. Yes, put on the clothing of ordinary people—but bring your swords. In the meantime, I’ll tell your master the prince that I’m sending you on a little errand.”
Chert made his way carefully around the temple. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of having to confront his brother or Nickel again—or at least so he told himself—but rather because he had no time to waste on conversation and the sort of small-minded niggling he felt sure he would get from the temple’s guardians. So he snuck through the great fungus gardens in front of the temple, then around the kitchen side where the smells from the malt house, especially the smoke of the oasting fires where the brew-moss was still being dried even in these terrible times, gave him a sharp pang of regret. When was the last time he had sat down and simply raised a cup with friends? When was the last time he had done anything except struggle to keep his family alive and to help out Vansen and the others fighting this terrible war? A man should not have to live like this.
But when gods and demigods fight, Chert reminded himself, an ordinary man is lucky if he can stay alive at all. He said a prayer to the Earth Elders and struck out for the grounds behind the temple and the path to the Cascade Stair.
It took him the better part of the morning to make his way up the long, circuitous route to the Silk Door and the outskirts of Funderling Town. The roads were quite deserted. He walked down the broad expanse of Ore Street and saw not a single worker returning from a job in the outer tunnels, no women coming back from the drying caverns or peddlers with handcarts trying to find a last customer before the midday meal. Were all his neighbors really so frightened? Chert thought that was strange when the fighting itself was so far away.
He stopped at the Salt Pool to have a look around but saw no one, not even little Boulder, and he began to wonder if he even wanted to travel through Funderling Town itself. What was going on here? From what Opal had told him, a tennight or so ago things had been mostly unchanged, the numbers reduced but the life of the town going on much as normal.
He found a lamplighter asleep sitting up in a back alley off Gem Street on the outskirts of the guildhall district. Chert shook him awake.
“What goes here?” he asked as the fellow sputtered his excuses. “Quiet! I don’t care what you were doing! What goes here? Where is everybody?”
The lamplighter, who had by now realized he was in no immediate danger, beckoned Chert down beside him. “The question is, what are you doing, mate? Have you got permission? A Guild pass to be out at this time of the day?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Since the Big Folk came—didn’t you know? Nobody can be in the streets of the town unless they have permission from the Guild.”
“Hold on! The Big Folk? What Big Folk?”
The man did not much want to talk, but he also clearly didn’t want Chert making a loud fuss, either. He explained quickly that when the southerners’ boats had caught fire in the bay (the first of this astonishing news Chert had heard) and newly arrived Syannese soldiers had unexpectedly conquered the outer keep, some of Hendon Tolly’s still-loyal soldiers, led by Durstin Crowel, had forced their way in through the Funderling Gate. When the Highwardens and other Funderling leaders had protested they had been imprisoned in their own guildhall.
Chert’s plan to find a sympathetic Highwarden who would grant him the Astion to complete his project had just become immeasurably harder, if not absolutely impossible. There was only one other way to achieve his aims, one he had briefly considered and then discarded as too dangerous, but he saw little choice now.
As Chert sat considering this wretched news, the lamplighter seized the chance to make his escape. Chert didn’t try to stop him—he had far too much to consider already. Should he try to find someone trustworthy among his own folk, navigate his way through all the inevitable fear and mistrust under very the nose of Durstin Crowel and his bullies? Or should he try to make his way out the gate of Funderling Town into the aboveground castle in search of another very particular kind of help? But even if he found his way out, the second idea would still be a long shot.
It seems I have become the master of unlikely schemes, he reflected.
It hurt to think and Chert had already spent many hours walking. He was exhausted and hungry; if he was going to be killed, he decided, it might as well happen now when he already felt wretched. He got up and made his way down Gem Street as inconspicuously as he could. The stone trees and their many carved residents looked down on him from the famous ceiling as he made his way toward the Funderling Gate.
At least a dozen guards from the castle waited there, dug in well back from the opening to the outer keep. Chert could hear the reason for their caution—cannon fire, not frequent, but enough to make him wonder whether he shouldn’t turn around and go back. But who was firing at whom? Was it the Xixians, still trying to break the defenders’ spirits? Or maybe those same defenders were shooting back at the Xixians, or maybe even at some Qar, if any of the fairy folk had ventured back aboveground.
It is a play, he thought. But not a comedy like the sort Chaven has told me about, with disguised princesses and runaway lovers. This is one of those great epics of disaster that he likes so much, with shouting and bloody bandages and kettledrums for gunfire. The kind you’re always grateful are happening to someone else.
Chert crept a little closer to the gate. Despite the noises of destruction from beyond the cavern’s mouth, the guards were still going about their business of denying exit to the ragtag crowd of Funderlings begging for their attention.
“I told you little rats, only Guild work gangs go through,” growled one of the guards, a man whose greasy face and bad temper suggested he had been interrupted in the middle of his meal. “Nobody else.”
“But two of our folk came back injured from working on the old walls this morning,” shouted a man at the back. “They will need replacements.”
“Then they will choose them when they come back tonight,” the shiny-faced guard declared. “What are you in such haste about? Don’t you like living in New Graylock?” He laughed and looked around to share the joke with his comrades. “New Graylock, eh?” He turned back to the supplicants. “Now piss off, or we’ll give you little naturals a spanking you won’t like.”
The crowd of Funderlings groaned and grumbled but showed no immediate signs of dispersing. Chert felt like groaning, too. How was he to get past this guard post? It was as hopeless as trying to find a sympathetic Highwarden who still had the authority to grant him an Astion.
Outside the cannons began to bark again. Chert was about to retreat to a safer spot and consider what he might do next when something abruptly smashed against the outside of the cavern with a crash so thunderously loud that it made his earlier thought of kettledrums seem childish. Half the opening came down in a moment, huge shards of stone flattening the makeshift guard post, crushing the tent and anyone still inside. Fragments spun through the air, knocking down other soldiers and Funderlings. Those of Chert’s people who had not been badly harmed immediately picked themselves up and fled deeper into the safety of the cavern entrance. Clouds of dust hung in the air, but Chert could see the guard who had spoken only a moment before, now bloodied and lying in a strew of rubble, twitching feebly.
Now or never, he thought. The Elders have shown me the way, I hope.
Of course, it could also have been that the Elders were showing him which way not to go: the devastation was astounding. The front of the gateway cavern had become a chaos of broken stone and swirling dust, and the cannons were still crashing outside.
Chert ducked his head and ran forward, stumbling over loose rocks. He had to step over a body buried under shattered stone, pale skin smeared with dirt and blood. He could not even tell if it was a Funderling or one of Durstin Crowel’s guards.
When he got out into the open, he kept his head down. The cannonball had struck the facing of the ancient cliff above the entrance to Funderling Town, just beneath the high, pale wall of the inner keep. The dust thrown up by the bombardment was nearly as thick here as inside the gate, but Chert was still struck by the sudden immensity of having sky over his head again for the first time since he and Flint had gone to the Drying Shed.
I can only pray to the Elders that the Rooftoppers will . . .
His thought went unfinished.
“Here he is!” cried a loud, unfamiliar voice, then someone pushed him to the ground from behind and yanked off his pack. “Got him.” A moment later, with Chert still pressed facedown against the stones, his captor pulled something like a sack over him. A few jerks as it was made tight, then a moment later he was lifted up and carried away at a fast, bouncing pace.
“Let me go!” he said. “You don’t understand! I have something important to do—lives are at stake . . . !”
“Shut your mouth and keep it shut,” growled his captor, and thumped the sack so hard against something that the little man’s teeth rattled. Chert didn’t try to speak again.
32
A Coin to Pay the Passage
“After Zmeos ate his eggs and porridge, he sat back in his chair. The Orphan quietly played his flute until the god fell asleep, still holding the great disk of the sun in his lap ...”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
RAFE COULD NOT HAVE been happier. His seventeenth Year-Moot had finally come and his father, the headman of the Hull-Scrapes-the-Sand clan, had given him beautiful black Sealskin to be his own. Rafe had long dreamed of this day—the day he could finally earn the necklace of a man! No longer would even his most impressive feats be undercut by the scornful words, “He still paddles his father’s boat.”
He had already made a name for himself, not just as a fisherman but also as a warrior. Had he not been one of the first to take fire to the ships of the southerners? Had he not braved the terrors of the Old Ones more than once, landing right on the Porcupine’s doorstep as he conveyed nobility back and forth from the Mount? Now Sealskin was his at last. All the years of his childhood, he had dreamed of this day, keeping her always waterproof and slippery as an eel by painting and repainting her hull with pitch. And most important, all that he earned now would no longer go into his father’s great jar. He would have his own jar, and soon enough his own house. Then he would take Ena away from her brute of a father and make her his wife. When they had enough money, they would marry and he would never again have to listen to any voice except hers and the ocean’s.
He slipped out through the secret way that led from the Western Lagoon and out to the sea road to Egye-Var’s Shoulder—M’Helan’s Rock as the drylanders called it—but Rafe did not plan to go anywhere near the Drying Shed nor any other part of the island. Clan curfew was an hour gone, and the last thing Rafe needed was to get into trouble again his first night as a man. He didn’t think his father Mackel would go so far as to take Sealskin back—he would be reluctant to shame the clan that badly in front of his rival Turley Longfingers and the Sunset-Tide folk at the Little Moot—but Rafe knew the old man would probably be very rigorous with whatever punishment he chose instead, which almost certainly meant a beating. Rafe didn’t want another beating. So although his heart felt as full as a bellied sail, he would not be singing or cutting capers on this, his first voyage with his own boat.
The southern ships had stopped burning, although many of the floating wrecks still leaked smoke into the dawn sky. Rafe swung widely around one of them, trying to decide whether it was one of those onto which he himself had thrown spears wrapped in flaming rags. He had never done anything more exciting in his life (except perhaps for some of the things he and Ena had got up to) and still could not quite believe he had even been allowed to do such a thing. But the Skimmer clan leaders, those stodgy old fellows like Turley Back-on-Next-Year’s-Tide, had suddenly changed: a single mysterious audience with some of the Old Ones and they had become warriors. Who would ever have guessed? Rafe had asked his father several times what had changed things so, but all Mackel would tell him was: “They have reached out a hand. We are forgiven.” When he asked, “Forgiven of what?” his father had told him to shut his blowhole and go catch some fish.
But what did such things matter anyway?
No matter who won this war, it meant nothing to Rafe. If he had to, he would pack up all his belongings, set Ena on Sealskin’s bench, and together they would paddle away somewhere else, upcoast or down. Perhaps it was time for the Ocean Lord’s folk to return to the Vuttish Islands? He and his sweetheart could surely find a deserted skerry and live out their lives there in happy solitude . . .
Musing on this and other fantasies, Rafe guided his boat in and out among the flotsam of the burned ships, looking for things to salvage. He had discovered a floating cask of southern honey this way the night before, the wood only lightly singed and the insides still protected by wax and cotton cloth, a find that had delighted his father who said he could get several silver coins for it at the least. In fact, Rafe felt sure that the goodwill caused by that discovery was why Mackel had finally told him the boat was his. Reminded of his good fortune, he patted Sealskin’s strong but delicate frame. The next cask of honey would be for Rafe himself to sell. Perhaps he could buy Ena a wedding necklace.
He passed through the ghost fleet and made a wide swing along the coast below the Marrinswalk headlands. The sun was coming up soon, and he knew he should not be staying out so long. Daylight would make it harder to sneak back in. He supposed he could pretend to have fallen asleep in the boat shed while cleaning Sealskin. He had certainly done it enough times in his youth.
Rafe’s planning was interrupted by something moving on the shore. He stared, trying to make sense of what he was seeing—something tall that stood almost at the waterline and was shrouded in cloth that whipped fitfully in the freshening breeze. What was it? Some bit of useful wreckage that had floated ashore and that another scavenger had found and might be coming back for? Was that why it was covered by that tattered cloak? Did someone really think that was enough to claim it as their own?
