Shadowheart s-4

by Tad Williams

  Perhaps there is something to be learned here… she thought absently, staring at the fine texture of the cloth. If it was a woolen shawl, it was a small one and its owners' initials had been worked into the design of flowers and birds. No, it wasn't a shawl at all, it was a Naming blanket, the kind children were wrapped in for the important religious ceremonies, and this one had four initials on it, which seemed unusual: OABE.

  Her heart fluttered and threatened to stop entirely. She gasped for breath. Could it be? Who else but a royal child would have four names? And what would make more sense than for little Alessandros to have his father's name, too-Olin. And Anissa's father had been named Benediktos…

  Olin Alessandros Benediktos Eddon. It was baby Alessandros' blanket.

  "Sir Stephanas!" Briony shouted. "Come here!"

  The tone of her voice was such that Stephanas and the other two soldiers did not hesitate, but left the death rites of their comrades and ran to her side. She showed them the blanket, then turned and looked past the ruined wall to the dark slopes beyond, a place of tangled old trees and few lights. Even the homeless might hesitate to make their camp in such a place.

  "The graveyard?" asked Stephanas. He did not sound as if he liked the idea.

  "It makes sense. There are more than a few tombs there big enough to hide in-some of them go very deep." This thought chimed strangely, but she pushed it aside. "I would bet my life that Hendon is hiding in there somewhere with my half brother." She turned to one of the two surviving infantrymen. "Hurry back to the residence. Tell Prince Eneas where we're going-ask him to send more men."

  "Where we are going?" Stephanas was still staring out into the dismal shadows of the temple yard. "Why don't we wait for the prince?"

  "Because it might be hours. Because we might be wrong, and if Hendon's not here, we need to know so we can look elsewhere. Don't you understand-he has one of my family as a hostage!" She turned back to the newly appointed messenger. "Go! Swiftly!"

  He hurried off. Briony turned to her remaining two companions. "Stay close to me. I know the place better than you do."

  "We will need torches," said Sir Stephanas.

  "That's the last thing we need," she told him. "No light to give us away! And we will have to be quiet, too. Don't you know anything about Hendon Tolly? He's like a serpent-he will always try to bite."

  As they reached the ancient, leaning gate, she held her finger to her lips to remind them to remain silent, then guided the reluctant soldiers through into the land of the dead.

  35

  His Dearie-Dove "As he passed through the great Marches, the shell of the egg became so hot that it crumbled to ash and fell away…"

  -from "A Child's Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven"

  It was the last conversation Ferras Vansen would have expected to have.

  "Moping, then, Captain?" someone asked him as he sharpened the blade of his ax. "Got a dearie-dove back home you wish you could see once more?" It was Sledge Jasper, cheerful despite a face that looked like a burned roast. His thickset right-hand man, Dolomite, squatted beside him.

  "A what? A dearie-dove?" Vansen couldn't help laughing a little. The hopelessness of his choice on that front mirrored the likelihood of him having picked the winning side in the war. He had been the gods' fool for so long he could barely remember the time before his hopeless love had settled over him like a storm cloud.

  "A sweetheart, Captain," said Jasper with an offended tone. "You know what I mean."

  If I survive, I will tell her, Vansen decided suddenly. I will have to leave Southmarch-if they do not have my head first for my presumption. But it will be worth it. I'll be an empty man, hollowed out and ready for something else to be poured in. Or at least prepared for an empty life afterward. "Nothing much to tell about," he said out loud. "What's the hour?"

  "The timekeeper puts it about an hour until midday," Jasper told him.

  "Ah." Vansen nodded. "So Midsummer's Day is still young." It was a bleak piece of news, since they needed to hold off the Xixians until past midnight. "As to ladies, how about you, friend Jasper? An accomplished fellow like yourself, a Wardthane, you must have someone waiting."

  Sledge Jasper made a face. "A wife. Does that count?"

  Dolomite grinned. "Your Pebble would have your knackers for that, Sledge."

  "And you, Dolomite?" Vansen asked, grasping at anything that might lead the men to think of something other than what lay ahead. "Have you a dearie-dove, as Jasper calls it?"

  The little man frowned. "None of the town girls understand me, Captain, to be frank. They don't see a man like me can have ideas beyond knocking heads. In truth, I'd like to start a tavern. Save up a few copper chips for a nest egg and then go to the next Guild Market when they start having them again, find myself a girl who hasn't already made her mind up about me. Maybe a Westcliff lass. They're not so handsome, the Settland Funderlings, but I've heard they're sensible…"

  Jasper and Dolomite went back to their men as Brother Flowstone returned and crouched beside Vansen.

  "I am afraid, Captain," the young monk admitted. "I thought I would be honored, even exalted, when the Elders called for me, but I am only frightened. I don't want to die."

  "You would be a strange young man in the prime of your life if you did."

  "I had many… I thought things would be… different…"

  Vansen reached over and patted the monk's shoulder. "Don't despair-you may yet live! But whether today or fifty years from now, we will all stand before Immon's Gate…"

  "We call him Nozh-la," Flowstone told him.

  "… We will all stand before Nozh-la's gate," Vansen continued, "waiting for the kind attentions of his master, the lord of death."

  "You are a poet, Captain." The monk seemed amused despite the quaver in his voice.

  Vansen, however, had been seized even as he spoke by a sudden vision, a memory so powerful that it shook him like a rat in a terrier's jaws, and for a long moment he could barely breathe. Immon's Gate. He had been there, or at least he could see it in his mind's eye as clearly as if he had, the great ornate portal of black stone, tall as a mountain, part of the featureless stone of the House of the Lord of the Underworld. And all around it lay the sullen, red lights and tall, deep shadows of the City of Death. Could it be? Had he actually seen it? But when? This phantom of his mind seemed so real!

  It doesn't matter when. Or even if it was a dream. I've seen it. I know it. I have been to the very gates of Death's own castle and returned. If the gods were trying to speak to him, Ferras Vansen was listening. He could almost hear rising voices like a temple choir, something bigger than himself lifting him, and for a moment he no longer feared anything.

  No matter what happens to me now or later, I have not had a small life!

  Something thumped at the far end of the great hall, a muffled crash that nearly extinguished the torches and sent stones rolling from the pile of rubble blocking the far entrance. Another thump, louder this time, forceful enough to slap both Ferras Vansen's ears and deafen him for a moment, shattered his thoughts into pieces. The far end of the chamber was full of dust and skittering stone. Shapes moved where only moments earlier a thousandweight and more of rubble had been piled.

  Vansen could see immediately that the autarch had not sent his ordinary foot soldiers, the Naked; instead, behind the swirl of dust and smoke, the cleared entrance was full of tall, pale shields, wedged together like the scales of a snake, an armored mass that bristled with spears like a hedgehog's quills as it advanced slowly into the room. The men were huge and their shields were painted with the ugly, snarling head of a dog-the autarch's most feared killers were leading the attack.

  With a roar that to Vansen's damaged hearing seemed scarcely more than a loud moan, the White Hounds surged forward into the Initiation Hall.

  The afternoon went by like a thunderstorm that lasted years. Vansen and his men held the first barricade of skillfully piled stone as long as
they could, but despite the protection of the high wall at least a dozen Funderlings fell. In lulls between skirmishes the bodies were dragged away and their armor and weapons redistributed. Vansen noted with grim amusement that finally, from sheer attrition, nearly all of his men were properly armed. At last, when the warders holding the far right side of the barricade had been so badly overwhelmed that the Xixians were clambering over the wall in numbers, Vansen called the retreat and the Funderlings dropped back to the second barrier.

  "Now hold them here!" he shouted. "Spears up, Guildsmen, spears up!"

  They held the second wall as long as they could. Time passed in a blur and the shouting became a smear of noise like the roaring ocean somewhere above their heads.

  Sky and sea, thought Vansen-oh, to see them both once more! And Briony Eddon's face! If you could love a god or goddess who would never know you, why not a princess? Was the love any the less because it couldn't come back to you?

  More Funderlings fell, even brave little Dolomite, Jasper's sergeant; more sprang forward to fill the places of the fallen, including monks who had only ministered to the wounded. Three Metamorphic Brothers, freshly come to the front line, were set on fire by an oil lamp the autarch's men shoved over the top of a barrier. As they ran screaming past their fellows, Vansen could feel despair welling up in the Funderling troops like a poisonous venom, stealing their strength; he knew that any instant they might all break and run for the great balcony and the whole force would be overwhelmed and slaughtered. Vansen leaned out and grabbed one of the blazing monks as he went past, burning his hand, and then threw himself on top of the shrieking man, doing his best to smother the flames with dirt and his own body. Vansen sat up to see the other Funderlings watching him in numb surprise.

  "Stop staring!" he bellowed. "Help these men! Call the healers. And protect your barricades!"

  Startled back to something like sense, the Funderlings dug in afresh. Others caught the burning monks and wrestled them to the ground to extinguish the flames, then dragged them to the back of the hall. When the Funderlings did give way some time later and fell back to the third barricade, it was under discipline and at Vansen's command.

  They could not hold the third barricade for long, nor the smaller fourth. The Xixians continued to swarm into the huge chamber, and as they cleared the stones from between the columns, they were able to bring more and more soldiers against the Funderling positions. The southerners could use arrows now, too, and although these did little damage against those who crouched behind the barricades, it was different for the Funderlings at the rear of the chamber. Young Calomel, Cinnabar's son, was shot in the back as he tried to drag his father's litter to a safer spot. As the monks carried off the wounded youth, Vansen and the others could only tell the sick and fretful Cinnabar over and over again that his boy would be well, though none of them truly believed it.

  Soon the ground was slick with blood, the ancient stone flags as treacherous as ice. At least a half dozen more Funderlings died defending the fourth wall, many of them from the ranks of the warders, Vansen's most experienced fighters. The little men were fighting bravely and the terrain was to their advantage, but the autarch's officers could bring up wave after wave of soldiers who were not only trained and equipped, but fresh to the fight as well.

  As the doomed afternoon and evening wore on, Vansen pondered the increasingly grim arithmetic of their defense. He had known they could never hope to do more than slow the Xixians, but it was plain now that without a miracle they couldn't hope to hold even an hour longer. At this pace, he and his Funderlings would lie dead to a man long before midnight.

  "Fall back!" he shouted. "Back to the last barricade!"

  He and several warders stayed to protect the retreat. Funderlings tumbled past him as they scrambled for the rear, their faces pale and haunted. Scaffolders, quarrymen, carvers, not a one of them had been a soldier, but here they were, giving everything they had to defend their tiny piece of country, and everything was indeed being taken from them. It was all Ferras Vansen could do to keep his rage and sorrow from overwhelming him.

  As Vansen and a few others fell back to join their comrades, a Xixian arrow caught Sledge Jasper in the back of a leg. He stumbled, falling behind the rest, and in that moment one of the Xixian soldiers saw his chance: the southerner sprang out into the no-man's-land between the two walls and drove his spear into Sledge Jasper's back as easily as skewering a fish in a drying pond, then leaped back with a shout of delight as Jasper took a step, crumpled, and fell.

  Before he could think about what he was doing Vansen had clambered back over the wall and rushed to his fallen comrade, meeting the surprised Xixian's defensive thrust with contempt. He yanked the man's spear out of his hands so hard that the Xixian took a helpless couple of steps toward him, which let Vansen bring his ward-ax around in a great sweep to crush the man's helmet and the head beneath.

  More Xixians were scrambling toward him now, ducking the rocks being thrown by Vansen's men from behind the last barricade. Vansen scooped up Jasper, whose small, stocky body was heavier than he expected as well as slippery with blood, and ran to the barricade. He delivered the wardthane into waiting hands, then dragged himself over to momentary safety as a flurry of arrows snapped against the stones all around him.

  He bent to the wounded man but it was too late: Jasper had stopped breathing. His eyes were open but saw nothing. Vansen felt a cold hatred seize his guts and squeeze them.

  "The Elders' blessings on you, Sledge," he said quietly.

  The Xixians had not attacked again, but he knew they soon would. Vansen turned to the other Funderlings, who watched him with wide-eyed fear or exhausted despair. This last wall had been built smaller and higher than the others in this narrowest part of the cavern, with the hall's only exit behind it. He made a quick estimate of how many men he still had-perhaps two or three hundred able to fight, no more. Even so, most of them were wounded, and Vansen himself was covered in blood too, much of it his own. He thought of several things to say, discarded them all.

  "Sit up straight, men," he told them finally. "Be pleased, not ashamed. We have nothing else left to do today except make a brave death. We have already made certain that these southerners, twice your size and ten times your numbers, will never be able to speak the name of the Funderlings or of Revelation Hall without sorrow at their losses and surprise at who caused them."

  A small murmur ran through the huddled men, including what might have been a ragged cheer or two.

  "Enough of this talking," Vansen told them. "Cinnabar is still here-he's just a little under the weather, but he still breathes. And Malachite Copper? He's here in his best suit-aren't you, Master Copper?"

  The Funderling cleared his throat. "Here indeed, Captain."

  "And Wardthane Jasper will be in the line outside Nozh-la's Gate with the rest of our friends who've gone ahead, watching to see what you do in the next hour. So don't disappoint them! Up, men, up!"

  As they struggled wearily to their feet, Vansen raised his voice to make sure even those in the back could hear him. "Put your shoulders against each other and lift your spears, men. Those who still have shields, keep them up and locked with your fellows'. Don't give ground except back toward the doorway… and whatever you do, do not break unless you hear me calling the retreat. More than our own lives depend on it."

  " 'Ware the wall!" someone shouted. The Xixians had brought up a ram and had begun trying to knock down the barricade. Suddenly, the Funderlings were all up and hurrying into place as if the moment of quiet had never happened. Vansen saw a face appear near the top of the wall and took a swing at it with his ward-ax. The Xixian soldier dropped away unscathed and went looking for a spot where the defenders were not so tall. After that, Vansen had little time to do anything except avoid being killed.

  Something bad had happened to Ferras Vansen's left arm; he could no longer lift it above his shoulder. Something else bad had happened to his leg. He could still stand on
it, but every time he shifted his weight he felt weakness and pain pierce his knee like a hot needle.

  Xixian rams had knocked holes in their last barricade in several places; beyond, Vansen could see manlike shapes and the flicker of torches. Another part of the barricade now shivered as more stones worked loose and tumbled to the floor, one of them crushing an already wounded man's leg. The fighting had grown too fierce even to pull the injured out of harm's way. Vansen had never been so exhausted in his life, not even in the lost months behind the Shadowline-it took all his strength simply to remember where he was and what was happening around him. Still, the ladders coming over the top of the barricades at either end were no dream, and the men climbing them were as real as Death itself.

  Nearby, several of the Naked warriors leaped down from the top of the barricade, swinging their curved swords and hand-axes. He realized he was staring like a drunkard while men died-his brave, brave men.

  "It's time!" Vansen shouted. "Back through the door! We'll make our stand on the Balcony. Fall back!"

  This time the distance was short. Vansen actually grabbed men and tugged them back from the fighting, but many others had been waiting for this moment and were already hurrying toward the doorway at the back of Revelation Hall in a retreat so ragged that some fell and others stepped on them. More and more Xixians were swarming over the final barricade.

  "Hurry!" Vansen picked up someone's spear from the flagstones and used it to keep the attackers at bay as the last of the Funderlings extricated themselves. He had taken so many wounds today that at any other time he would be with the other injured being cared for, but as the biggest man among his troops he knew that he was always being watched: Vansen remaining upright through all the waves of attack had done much to keep his own men in fighting spirit. But Vansen also knew that the time had come when strategy meant nothing. Each man must now sell his life for as brave a price as he could, but they would never know whether it had been enough.