by Tad Williams
27
Full of the Stuff "Old Aristas was too feeble to accompany him now, so Adis set out on a white horse the villagers gave to him, with only a servant named Moros for companionship."
-from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"
The goblins were busy dismantling Yasammez's tent, but when the Elementals shivered into view they hopped out of the way, nimble as crickets, before returning to their chores. Neither Yasammez's chief eremite Aesi'uah or any of the others paid them any further attention. Goblins, especially those who labored in the larger houses, were legendarily discreet.
Only a few dozen other creatures remained in the large cavern known as Sandsilver's Dancing Room, most of them engaged like the goblins in removing all remnants of the camp that wouldn't dissolve or disappear on their own. The chamber was full of unusual scents and sounds; some of the rendering powders smelled like burning flowers; some of the laborers sang or rubbed their wings instead of speaking.
The newly arrived Elementals stood before Yasammez. "Hail, Great Lady," said Stone of the Unwilling, courteously diffusing the glare of his presence. "You called, we came."
"Is that true?" The dark lady pitched her voice in the tone that the Elementals could see as a cold blue light. "Because there are other times I have called you but did not receive such a swift answer. In fact, I received no answer at all."
Stone of the Unwilling shifted, flickered. "My lady?"
"You have always been faithful to your people's old promises," Yasammez said, "both to me and to the Fireflower."
"Of course, Lady. And I am still faithful."
"Perhaps. But I would have hoped you would have brought me a clanswoman who would be as faithful in friendship and courage as you are… instead of this one."
The smaller Elemental's glow jittered a bilious yellow for a moment before she spoke. "Mistress, do you doubt my loyalty to the People?"
"I make no accusations, Shadow's Cauldron, but I do ask why you have not responded to my call. Three times I summoned you, and three times the void in which your people swim like fishes sent me back no word of you."
Yellow-green flashed again. "And does that make me a traitor, Mistress?"
"Clanswoman!" It was easy to see that Stone of the Unwilling was agitated; his light jiggled like wind-whipped fire beneath his wrappings. "That is no way to speak to the Daughter."
"Not even a demigoddess can call me traitor."
Watching this bizarre confrontation, the councillor Aesi'uah felt a shadow of superstitious terror fall over her. The Elementals were the last and fiercest of the races to join in the confederation of the People; some said they wielded powers that even the Fireflower dynasty feared. Stone of the Unwilling's people would make terrible enemies.
"Why so much anger, Shadow's Cauldron?" the eremite asked aloud, framing her hands in a carefully chosen gesture of supplication. "That does not seem best for people surrounded by enemies, as we are."
"But we begin to wonder whether it is Lady Yasammez herself who is no longer as firmly in service to her people as she would have us believe," said the smaller Elemental.
"Clanswoman, I do not understand you," said Stone of the Unwilling. "Clearly, we must go somewhere where the winds and lights of our words can play unhindered, so you can explain this outrageous behavior to me." He turned to Yasammez, his robes billowing in his discontent. "Forgive us, Mistress. Forgive my clanswoman."
The lights glared from Shadow's Cauldron's hood, and her arms stretched as though she might reach all the way to the high ceiling of the cavern, but she was only reshaping herself; when she had finished, she made herself into a strange replica of Yasammez, but she had let slip the ribbons covering her face and what hung before them was a terrible, empty glare. "Why did you give up the Seal of War?" she said. "Tell us why, Lady."
"It is hardly your place to demand answers." Her thoughts were as cold as stinging sleet. "I did what was best for the People."
"You gave both your blessing and your army to Saqri, wife and sister of the mortals' greatest friend in Qul-na-Qar, that traitor Ynnir!" Shadow's Cauldron's thoughts were sharp and comfortless. "If you needed any more proof, she has already brought a mortal into our midst and all but shares her power with him! A mortal! Together, they will throw away lives by the handful, when there is only one weapon we need to destroy this southern upstart and his plans." She flourished her gloved hand and the gleaming sphere that was the Fever Egg appeared there. "Do not try to take it from me," she warned. "It is an image, no more. But it has been given to the Elementals and we will make certain it is well-used."
"This goes too far…" began Stone of the Unwilling.
"It is powerfully close to the very treachery you deny," said Aesi'uah.
"Who are you, eremite?" spat Shadow's Cauldron. "A creature of bones and mud. Not to mention one of the Dreamless-an entire country of traitors…!"
"Enough." The voice of Yasammez was like a whipcrack in all their thoughts. Though she made no audible sound, the goblins carrying her tent across the other side of the cavern fell to the floor, clutching their heads in terror. "Silence-all of you. Do you know to whom you speak, woman of the Elementals? Has no one told you?" Yasammez took a step forward, and although the movement was slight, the Elementals' robes billowed as though a great wind had come. "I am Yasammez of the Wanderwind Mountains, the daughter of Crooked himself! You dare to hold your judgment up to mine?"
"You have given up the Seal of War…!"
"I have given the Seal of War to Saqri, the last in my family's line-the hearth of the Fireflower! It was she and her husband-brother who gave the Seal to me in the first place." She closed her outstretched hand and the image of the Fever Egg was suddenly gone from Shadow's Cauldron's hand. "Now I will tell you what will happen. You will listen and understand. If you do not obey me, the void will not recognize you and the wind will not carry you nor the darkness hide you."
"Since we swore our loyalty to the Fireflower, we have always been its strongest and most determined allies," declared a fretful, flickering Stone of the Unwilling. "This is only a small dispute, Mistress-a confusion created by the fires and shadows of war."
Yasammez gave him a cold look and went on as though he had not spoken. "I do not know what will happen in these final days. I do not know what my own role will be. I do know what yours will be, Shadow's Cauldron. You will keep the Fever Egg safe and unbroken until I say otherwise. Do you understand?"
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!"
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"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."
