by Jay Lake
"Yes?"
"They call you their patron now. You seem to bring them more comfort than burning joss sticks to some dead cavalryman at an altar behind a stable."
The very idea horrified Bijaz. "I'm a stupid little god. I mostly cheat at dice and cards, and make flowers."
"You kill, and you make life. That's all one can ask of any god."
Bijaz had never made life. He had only called it back once. "I am no one's god. People near me get hurt."
Pierce smiled. "People everywhere get hurt, but people near you live, too. You can be a blessing and not realize it."
"Then blessings upon us all," he said, trying to disguise the bitterness in his voice.
With Bijaz up and walking, the Northern Expedition decamped from the great gallery where it had sheltered. He tallied eighty-nine men, plus Ashkoliiz and her councilors. That meant eleven deaths so far, unless he'd mistallied.
Even with the losses, everyone was in high spirits. Surviving the shaft had been a signal honor for those who had gone up first. Everyone had seen the smoking grubs, the shattered bodies of the dead, the blizzard of roses from on high.
They were still talking about it.
The gallery itself was a wonder. Several districts of the City Imperishable could have fit within. A dim light showed from a distant bend high up on one wall. The ceiling seemed to belong to a natural, if enormous, cave. The original mine must have been worked from the floor down.
They followed a roadway that passed between great pillars carved with faces of men and animals. Their track ramped up along one wall to rise toward the lighted bend.
It took over an hour's walk to leave the gallery. The roadway wound up and out to a paved opening similar to the one through which they'd entered far below, but much larger. This vast cavern mouth contained an abandoned town. The buildings were roofless and slumped but partly protected by the shelter of the stone soaring above them.
Bijaz missed a step as he took in the view ahead.
They faced north, that he knew from simple logic. An arid plain below him stretched for miles on miles. A gleaming ridge of mountains rose on the horizon, white with faint lines which might be cliffs of stone showing through their mantle of snow. Those distant peaks had to be the Rimerocks.
Nothing could be seen upon that plain—no fields, no roads, no towns. Just a nearly endless stretch of broken gold and brown. What had been a few feet of olive-and-tan paint on a tabletop back in the City Imperishable was here a wide wilderness of near-desert.
"He's out there somewhere," Bijaz muttered.
"He's out there," Ashkoliiz agreed, walking next to him.
They strode onto the apron of the cave. The sun was above and behind them, a bit south of the Silver Ridges.
Bijaz was looking for the trees when the buzzing erupted from behind him. That was when the screaming began.
The enemy was as big as he'd feared. Great, glittering eyes bulged from rounded heads slick with chitin armor. Vast wings wide as a building shone translucent in the late afternoon light. The buzz was the same manic thunder he'd heard in the shaft, magnified by the cave, layering echoes on echoes until the noise was a creature of its own. The attackers swooped low, legs longer than lamp posts reaching down to snag men between cruel black pincers.
These were not bees, but wasps.
Bijaz hadn't the least idea what to do. He couldn't strike down dozens of the giant creatures. Transforming the paper plug within the shaft had left him unconscious for two days. That didn't seem a trick to be played again.
He compromised by hurling himself to the ground.
The rest of the Northern Expedition fought. Iistaa reared to his full height and actually pulled down a wasp. The insect slammed into the ground with a crunch of shattering chitin. Pale goo shot out from it. Bijaz noticed other wasps dodging the spray.
He crawled toward the nearest yellow-white puddle. It had a familiar reek. Bijaz rolled through the puddle. The stuff was warm and sticky, and acrid enough to burn his skin.
Manic inspiration overrode his sense of self-preservation. He stood and waved, screaming, "Come get me, you big buggers."
A giant wasp dove toward him. Bijaz windmilled his arms wide as he could, wondering how stupid he really was. Maybe he should have reached for his powers after all.
The wasp pulled away at the last moment with an uncoordinated buzz of those great, pale wings. It made a running skip over him, then took off again.
"Kill more," Bijaz shouted. "Cover yourselves in their guts!"
Wee Pollister rolled into another steaming puddle of goo. "Get it on yer!" he roared. His voice carried.
The ice bear brought down another wasp. Men dashed toward the broken abdomen, sliding into the oozing puddles.
Then they were gone. Three insects were dead, while the Northern Expedition had lost at least a dozen men, including Pierce the light troop commander. Bijaz watched the wasps fly away over the open country to the north until they vanished in the endless distance.
One of the Northmen loomed next to him, still coated in wasp guts. Ulliaa, Bijaz thought. The Northman nodded once, a note of respect more profound than any celebration, before turning away to help sort out the chaos.
He could see why Ashkoliiz had not worried so much about supplies. Her men would attrit fast enough on their own.
If only a few survived to return with a cartload of gold and history, they might be very rich indeed. Who would there be to gainsay them?
By the time the Northern Expedition double-timed away from the burning corpses of their friends and enemies, everyone seemed to know that bathing in the wasp guts was Bijaz's idea. Though the ice bear had been the true hero of the battle, the men preferred to confer their gratitude upon a fellow human being.
And once again the losses seemed only to bolster their spirits. Thirteen dead or taken, and here the troops were belting an off-key song about a general's sister and a one-legged Tokhari.
Bijaz never would understand soldiers, let alone these ragged brigands.
Wee Pollister stuck to him like a shadow, to the point of gathering irritated glances from Ashkoliiz. Bijaz was certain she had not factored either encounter with the wasps into her calculations. Perhaps the men were dying too fast. Perhaps he was growing too popular.
He wondered what the Northmen thought. He increasingly suspected them of independence from Ashkoliiz, and possibly even holding some hidden authority over her.
A road led down this side of the mountains, with its head at the cavern. Though centuries old, many of its embankments had not crumbled. A number of bridges were intact as well. Bijaz noted a few trees. They made good time, reaching the escarpment's base around full dark.
As the men set down their gear, Ashkoliiz met them with a torch held high so that her face was lit from above. The leaping shadows made a mask of her. She became something bloody and old rising up out of the sere soil of this high, dangerous place.
"We have come to our meeting place," the mountebank announced in her quiet, calm tone. "Here we will build our advance base. The mounted column and the camels will arrive soon."
Bijaz had his doubts about that.
"Our journey is half done," she continued, looking first one way then the other. "He is here. Out there in the darkness somewhere, he is here." Her voice pitched higher and louder. "Where is he?"
"He is here," replied the Northern Expedition. Even Bijaz found his lips moving.
"Where is he?" She was shouting now.
"He is here!" The troops shouted back.
"Where is he?"
"He is here!"
Her voice dropped to the quiet of a spring rain, barely audible over the crackling of her torch. "Yes. He is here. And we shall bring him home."
They cheered madly, the sound echoing to the cold stars overhead. All Bijaz could think of was how far noise might carry in this high, deserted country where even ship-sized wasps could vanish like dust. Anything might be listening. Anything at all.
Onesiphorous
Five flatboats approached at dusk, each poled by an Angoumois. They all wore undyed linen cassocks, with long white scarves around their necks.
These were the fire dancers from his passage through Angoulême, Onesiphorous realized. Men who'd cut their own throats on a single cord.
He shivered. She was strong tonight.
"I'm impressed," said Ikaré in a tone which clearly indicated he did not mean any such thing.
"Whatever it is you need, I'd go find it now." Soon Onesiphorous would be rid of the intransigent dwarf.
Sidero pelted out with the other two Sunwarders, carrying one of the mine's precious few rifled muskets and an array of tools. They also toted the bulk of the food supplies, as their group faced the most distance to travel.
"West," said Onesiphorous, "as far as you can go. Find the most distant thumb being actively mined. Work your way back from there."
Sidero nodded, then looked at the boatman. "Is this to be safe?"
Onesiphorous turned to address all of the laden miners returning to the dock. "These folk will aid us, but they serve another master. They move in silence. Respect that and do not fear them."
He was answered by muttering.
"You have come too far to stop now," Onesiphorous added. "There is nothing more to keep us here. We must go."
"He is to be having the right of it," Sidero said loudly. "I am to be going." The Sunwarder stepped down into the first flatboat. Sidero helped his fellows down, then looked up as the flatboat poled away, the Angoumois boatman still staring at the water.
Onesiphorous had already divided the rest of the miners in three groups based on their destination: south to the coast, further upriver to the other thumbs in the immediate region, and west to the nearer mines. Ikaré went south with two of the City men, for once holding his tongue.
Beaulise was among the last to depart. She looked up at Onesiphorous from her chosen boat. "When it's over," she began, then shook her head.
"When it's over," he told her, "we'll find a way to make things right."
"Fifteen years too late for that, dwarf." Her flatboat glided off into the mists.
Onesiphorous, Jason, and Kalliope stepped one by one down into the final boat. They would head upriver to the docks at the Fallow Acres plantation. They'd brought no weapons and no food, for they had the shortest journey.
He looked at the boatman. This one raised his head and met Onesiphorous' eye. "You going far, little City man, ah?"
The face was a fire dancer's, but the voice was the swamp-mother's.
"You said they would not fight," Onesiphorous told her.
"They no fight. These horses my eyes."
"Then you know where we go."
"I know," said the swamp-mother. "Now show me. I would see it."
It what? Onesiphorous wondered.
Kalliope reached forward and opened her hand. The blue jade shard sat glittering within.
The horse stared awhile, though he kept his hands on the pole. Finally he spoke. "That has not been seen in a thousand years, ah."
The horse's lips didn't quite match the sound of her voice.
"And it won't be seen again if we fail in our purposes," Onesiphorous said, with a glance at Kalliope.
The sandwalker's expression was set. Of course, one of her training would know the grip of the noumenal. Jason just smiled, his eyes nearly vacant except for a faint green glow.
Their boatman poled away through the mists, keeping to the edge of the night-dark water to avoid the fastest reach of the current.
The journey upriver lasted well into the next morning. Stretches of open space populated with sedge and cattails spread before them with the dawn. White wading birds stalked in the first light, catching the fish which followed the morning's rise of insects. The dank, muddy dark reek of the swamps shifted to a grassier scent, mixed with the dirt-and-water of fresh-fallen rain.
The boatman poled mechanically as any engine. Onesiphorous, Kalliope, and Jason shared a water skin and dozed. There seemed little point in conversation.
Eventually he saw a wooden dock extending from a high-banked meadow. They'd reached the edge of some plantation's outlying fields.
Fallow Acres, he hoped.
The river had grown much narrower, too. Tributaries flowed from recognizable banks, not just seepage from tree-bounded marges. Even the trees themselves looked more homelike, except for the beards of moss clinging to their branches.
The air was also much hotter.
"I can hear the beating hearts of the trees," said Jason.
"Of course you can," muttered Onesiphorous.
They passed a bend in the river to see a cluster of buildings close by the water. Several docks had barges tied close. A town lay behind a series of whitewashed wooden warehouses. Farther up the hill, the uniform green of young crops was a tinge on the plowed fields.
An Angoumois waited at the first of the docks. He wore canvas trousers and a denim shirt. When he got a closer look at the flatboat, he hurried back toward a two-story building tucked in among the warehouses.
The flatboat glided up to the dock. Jason and Kalliope climbed the ladder. Onesiphorous paused to glance at the boatman, whose chin was tucked on his chest as his face tilted down.
"Are you there, ma'am?" he asked politely.
The boatman looked up. Nothing was in his eyes but the deep shadows of Angoulême.
Onesiphorous scrambled up the ladder, allowing Kalliope to help him over the edge. When he regained his feet he saw that a dozen Angoumois were arrayed at the far end of the dock with field implements braced as weapons.
"We are expected?" Kalliope asked.
"I believe they caught a look at our boatman and panicked." Onesiphorous considered who he was traveling with. "Let me do the talking. Don't, ah, do anything surprising?"
"Of course not." Kalliope glared at her brother.
Imago
His cell was four paces wide and three deep, and shorter than the height of a full-man. There was no light at all. Imago's fingers told him that the ceiling curved upward. The wall within the implied arch was brick, the floor a very thick wood, the other walls dressed stone.
There was no door.
The bailiffs had banged his head on steps as they dragged him down into the palace basements, until he'd thrown up. As a result, Imago wasn't sure if the brick had been laid after he'd been placed here, or if they'd breached the floor.
There was no bed, only a pallet of increasingly foul straw. A bucket came up through a small hatch in the boards once a day. It usually contained a cold roasted potato and a leather bottle of water tinged with wine. He'd tried grabbing the edge when the hatch opened, but someone below had slammed it shut on Imago's fingers. That happened twice. Going without food for a while, not to mention the pain, convinced him to desist that effort.
He had nowhere to shit or piss but in the food bucket. He left it and the empty bottle beside the hatch. They disappeared when new food came. Whoever was below worked in their own darkness—Imago never did see light. One time he left the bucket directly on the hatch so it spilled downward. He'd gone without food, water, or a pot to piss in for quite some time after that.
Imago didn't know if a day had passed each time he slept. He wasn't even sure he did sleep, really. His dreams and his waking hours had a terrifying sameness.
Black, dark, black.
He counted the brick courses. Nineteen of them, cut off at the highest point. He counted the bricks, seeking a loose one. Sometimes there were two hundred and thirty-eight. Sometimes there were two hundred and thirty-seven. Every so often there were two hundred and thirty-nine.
When he became bored of freelance masonry, he counted the dead in the Great Hall. How many of his own had fallen? All of the Winter Boys? What of the others, servants and sailors and people of the street? Had any of the Burgesses died?
Where was Marelle?
Had they sent Enero's body home?
Imago surrendered himself a sliver at a time to the shadow, until despair found him. He'd raged and screamed under the altar knife amid the tombs of the Old Gods, but there had been purpose then. Even the pain served a need. This was just torture for its own sake. His captors would have been kinder to kill him.
