Shadowrise

by Tad Williams

  “The air feels loose here.” Sledge Jasper’s mouth was almost touching Vansen’s ear. “But the far end’s stubbed, so there must be an upthwart hole—but there isn’t. It makes no sense to me.”

  It made no sense to Vansen either, but that was because he wasn’t a Funderling—the chief warder might as well have been speaking ancient Ulosian. “Stubbed? Upthwart? What does any of that mean?”

  “Quiet!” Jasper whispered.

  Vansen had only an instant to wonder at that before Jasper grabbed his arm and yanked him forward and down onto his knees. A moment later metal clattered violently against stone behind them: something fast and sharp had flown past them and struck the wall where they had been standing an instant before.

  “What is it?” he hissed as loudly as he dared. “What’s . . . ?”

  “A trap!” He was jerked again, downward this time as Jasper dropped onto his belly. The Funderling’s grip was astonishingly powerful considering he was no bigger than a child. “Keep your head down!”

  “I’m going to uncover the lantern,” Vansen said. “Get some idea of what’s going on . . .”

  “Not near your head!” growled Jasper. “In fact, don’t do it near any of us.” The other Funderlings in the little troop were just now crawling up from behind them. Vansen stretched out his arm and set the lantern down a little way above and to the side of where they lay on the uneven floor. What kind of room was this? They called it the Great Dancing Chamber, but it felt more like a gravel quarry than a ballroom. He flicked up the shield and the lantern’s glow spilled out, suddenly giving form and depth to what had been an endless, frightening blackness.

  He barely had time to draw his hand back before several arrows whined through the spot where his fingers had been. One struck the lantern a glancing blow; the cylinder of metal and hard sea-glass was knocked spinning onto its side but the light did not go out.

  Vansen risked raising his head for a quick look. A handful of moving shapes, some holding short bows, were scrambling for cover at the far end of the chamber like rats surprised in a storeroom, their shadows gigantic and spidery in the light of the single, dim lamp.

  Ferras Vansen had not planned on facing arrows—the narrow underground passages had seemed to make them an unlikely weapon—but here he sat in a classic infantryman’s nightmare, pinned down by a force he could barely even see with no way to fight back other than a hopeless frontal assault. It was pure luck that he and the Funderlings had not been slaughtered where they stood: they had apparently caught the Qar by surprise. Now all they could do was wait and hope that Cinnabar and the rest of the Funderling Town reserves would come as they had promised. But how to keep them from walking into the same trap?

  “Simple enough,” said Sledge Jasper after hearing Vansen’s whispered concerns. “If there’s a vein of drumstone between here and the Brothers’ temple we’ll have no problems, Longshanks—that’s how we talked in the mines and even sometimes farther, but those were the old days. Anyroad, we’ll just keep hammering on it until someone hears us. But whatever you want to say likely ought to be short and sweet.”

  Drumstone. That was a new one. Vansen raised his head again and peered across the chamber to where the enemy crouched behind what looked like a forest of stony towers, most of which stretched no higher than a tall Funderling. One of the Qar saw his movement well enough to snap off a shot: the arrow hissed past him and shattered against stone; a broken piece caromed off and dug into his hand. Vansen grunted in pain and sucked at the blood. “How about two words? ” he asked Jasper. “ ‘Help’ and ‘trap.’ Short enough for you?”

  They sent a pair of men back to the seam of drumstone that crossed the road they had followed to the Dancing Chamber. The warning worked. Cinnabar and his troop of two dozen men came swiftly but carefully into the great cavern, carrying slings and other long distance weapons, and despite the inexperience of these new fighters, many of whom did not even have the rudimentary exposure to violence the warders had, they managed to help Vansen and Jasper chase the dozen or so armed Qar back out of the Great Dancing Chamber. The victory cost them: two Funderlings were killed, one of them a warder named Feldspar, so it was a somber group that headed back toward the Metamorphic Brothers’ temple.

  Vansen and Cinnabar walked behind the men carrying the bodies. Ferras Vansen was doing his best to divide his attention between complicated thoughts about the day’s losses and lessons and the need to watch for low ceilings. He had been living with the Funderlings long enough that they sometimes forgot he was twice their height and couldn’t see as well as they could, and thus didn’t warn him when a low threshold was coming.

  “I wish I had known of this drumstone before,” he said.

  “There are only a few small veins connecting parts of Funderling Town,” Cinnabar said. “It was pure luck Jasper had seen that seam. The greatest use of drumstone was over longer distances, but we almost entirely stopped using it over the last hundred years or so as we lost touch with other towns and cities.”

  “Still, what a wonderful thing, if I understand Jasper correctly—to be able to signal over a distance underground! Have the . . . the Big Folk, as you call us, ever known of this?”

  Cinnabar laughed. “I can assure you they did not. You’ll forgive me if I say we thought it more likely to be something we needed to protect ourselves against your people than to aid them.”

  “Fair enough. And I promise I will keep the secret—the gods know I owe you and your folk that much and more. But it seems to me another example that you Funderlings have misplaced your trust when you ask me to lead you. Even were I as veteran a commander as you suppose—which, I assure you, I am not—I still know too little about this underground world in which we fight. The Qar reaching that chamber before us caught me completely by surprise. How did they do it?”

  Cinnabar’s amiable, weathered face showed surprise even in the thin light of Vansen’s lantern. “But Jasper says he told you. The road should have been stubbed there, but he knew by the smell of the air that a second opening had been made, so that means there must be a new tunnel upthwart the stub-end at the far side of the Great Dancing Chamber . . .”

  “There, you see? I still don’t understand.” He raised his hand. “No, do not explain it to me now, Magister—there is too much to do. But when we return and have our council, I need you and Chert and the others to help me learn. We must find a way to remedy my ignorance before I get us all killed.”

  The Funderlings and the two Big Folk were grouped around one of the large tables in the refectory of the Metamorphic Brothers’ temple, a place that had become the seat of the Funderling War Council, as Vansen had come to think of it—mostly because only the refectory and the chapel were large enough for many to sit down together.

  In the previous days Ferras Vansen had sometimes viewed his involvement with these little men and women as almost amusing, as if he had been asked to lead an army of children, but that had ended long ago with the first assault by the Qar. Anyone who still doubted the seriousness of their situation need only descend to the deep, cold room beneath the main altar where the bodies of the two fallen Funderlings, Feldspar and Schist, lay waiting for their burial cairns to be built.

  Vansen looked across the table at Jasper, Magister Cinnabar, and Brother Nickel. Nickel’s power within the Brotherhood seemed to grow stronger by the day: there had been no confirmation yet that he would be the next abbot, but the other monks seemed to take it as a given. Chaven was also at the table—the only other person Vansen’s size—but the physician seemed fretful and preoccupied. Beside him sat Malachite Copper, another important Guildsman, tall and slender for a Funderling, who had brought a contingent of volunteers down from the town to help defend the lower tunnels. Although the cavern-dwellers had no lords as such, Copper was the closest thing Vansen had seen down here to what he would have called a noble. Judging by his clothes, he was certainly the richest of them all. Young Brother Antimony rounded out the group: Vans
en had been told that Chert Blue Quartz and his strange adopted son were off on some private errand and could not be present.

  “I must beg your pardon,” Vansen told the others. “I simply cannot accustom myself to the way you talk—upwise, thwart, sluiced, scarped, stubbed—I cannot understand it, not swiftly enough to lead men into battle. I am used to fighting on solid ground that spreads like a blanket before me, but here I find the blanket is wrapped around my head. I think you should give this task of leadership to someone like Cinnabar or Copper.”

  “I do not like to fill my head with details.” Malachite Copper spoke lazily, as though it was almost too much effort to finish what he was saying. “I will have enough to do with leading my own scrapesmen. No, not me.”

  Cinnabar also shook his head. “As for me, I have not the knowledge of fighting, Captain Vansen, but I will do my best to help you to think as we think.”

  “But how can I learn all your people know? These drumstones, Stormstone’s tunnels—I do not have time to become a scholar, even had I the wit for it!”

  “Likely none of us is fit to perform the job entire,” Chaven said. “If we want to survive we must work together and try to forge a single martial leader from among our disparate parts—a patchwork soldier, as in the old tale of King Kreas.”

  “Still,” said Copper, “even if the mighty Stone Lord himself were to come out of the deeps to lead us, we would need more men than we have. Cinnabar, my dear, you must send a message to the Guild telling them to send every able-bodied fellow who can be spared to fight—sadly, we cannot pull the workers from the few jobs Hendon Tolly has given us without causing suspicion. That may bring us as many as a thousand. Until then we have less than two hundred all told, four pentecount at the outside, and only a few of those capable fighters. How many Qar wait on the far side of the bay?”

  Vansen shook his head. “We never knew when we fought them—that was part of the hardship, that they could make their numbers and positions so confusing. But judging by what I saw of them marching, long ago, I guess they still muster several times our numbers.”

  “And from what you say, we could not hope to outfight them even if we matched them man for man,” Cinnabar said.

  “The March Kingdoms could not defeat them with many thousands, including hundreds of veteran fighters, cannon, and armored cavalry. But we were overconfident.” He smiled sadly. “We will never be so again.”

  “Is there any chance the upgrounders—I mean your people, Captain Vansen—might help us? Surely Hendon Tolly does not want the Qar roaming free beneath his castle!”

  “No, but first you would have to convince him,” Vansen said thoughtfully. “That might be done . . . but then even if he agreed to help you he would never simply give you back Funderling Town afterward. Once he knew of the Stormstone tunnels and everything else belowground, he and his soldiers would be here to stay.”

  Malachite Copper broke the long, morose silence. “But the fairy creatures must fight us down here,” he pointed out. “Surely that should be to our advantage, if we can only improve our numbers.”

  “Don’t forget they have Funderlings of a sort among them,” said Cinnabar. “And other creatures of the deeps as well, like ettins, some of which we only know from old stories . . .”

  “So it is hopeless. Is that what you are saying?” Nickel stood up. “Then we must all prepare to meet our maker. The Lord of the Hot Wet Stone will save us if he sees fit—if we have pleased him—but if not, then he will do with us as he wishes. All this warlike posturing is for nothing. The Nine Cities of the Funderlings will be emptied but for dust and shadows.”

  “We do not need that kind of talk,” Cinnabar said angrily. “Would you terrify our people into recklessness? At the very least, Nickel, think of our wives and children. Ah, but I forgot—you Metamorphic Brothers do not have time for such trivialities!”

  “We do holy work!” Nickel shouted and the argument began in earnest, even Copper joining in, but Ferras Vansen was no longer listening.

  “Enough,” he said. When they did not heed him, he raised his voice, deeper and stronger than any of theirs. “Enough! Shut your mouths, all of you!” Everyone in the room turned to stare at him in surprise. “For the sake of the wives and children you mentioned—for all of our sakes—stop this squabbling. Brother Nickel, I heard you say ‘the Nine Cities of the Funderlings’—what does that mean?”

  Nickel waved a dismissive hand. “It is only an expression—it means all the Funderlings together, not just those here in Funderling Town.”

  “So there are other Funderlings? Where? Magister Cinnabar, you said something to me earlier about towns and cities, but I thought you meant ordinary towns, Firstford and Oscastle and the like.”

  Cinnabar shook his head. “I understand your interest, Captain Vansen, but if you are envisioning thousands of Funderlings sweeping in to save us from all over Eion, I’m afraid I must disappoint you. Some of the so-called cities are long gone, and little remains of most of the others—those that are in reach, that is. Two of them are behind the Shadowline and one is on the southern continent Xand.”

  “But are there still Funderlings who live outside of Southmarch?”

  “Some, of course. Even long after our days of glory there have been Funderlings living in most of the biggest cities, working in stone and forging metal for the Big Folk, but their numbers have grown smaller and smaller. Here too. Just a hundred years back we were nearly twice as many as now.” Cinnabar shrugged. “There is still a good-sized settlement in Tessis and another in the quarry mountains of Syan—between them they might have as many Funderlings as here. And I’ve heard some still live in our old city of Westcliff in Settland, although it is scarcely more than a village now. Perhaps another thousand of us are scattered around the other cities of Eion. At year’s end we usually come together for the great festival called the Guild Market, but I do not think we will survive here long enough to be able recruit any help at market.” He shrugged. “Have I anticipated your idea incorrectly, Captain?”

  “No, you have hit it squarely, Magister.” Vansen frowned. “But I would still like to know if these drumstones will speak as far as Syan.”

  “They used to,” said Malachite Copper. “But the stones have long since fallen silent between here and there.”

  “You said there are as many Funderlings in Syan as here,” Vansen said to Cinnabar. “Perhaps they will help us. Doubling our numbers would certainly keep us alive a good deal longer.”

  Cinnabar nodded slowly. “I suppose we can’t afford to overlook even so unlikely a chance. In the old days there was a train of drumstones between here and what the Big Folk call Underbridge, the Funderling settlement in Syan. Unless the ground has shifted badly I see no reason they shouldn’t still suffice.”

  “Forgive me,” said Malachite Copper, “but I really must ask a question. What good is it if we could even bring five times the numbers we have now from somewhere else? We still would have too few to defeat the Qar, if everything I’ve heard today is true. What then is the point? It will take weeks for help to come from Underbridge—until Midsummer at least, even if they choose to send it, which I doubt. But even if they come, what real difference could it make?”

  “You’re right,” Vansen told him. He had been thinking, in his slow, careful way, and he could see no other road forward. “It is true—we cannot defeat the Qar. They are fierce fighters, but they also have a terror and madness on their side like nothing I have ever seen or felt. But I do not intend to beat them.”

  Brother Nickel snorted in disgust. “Then why do we not simply surrender now? At least then we will be choosing the manner of our deaths.”

  Copper scowled at him. “Be quiet, you burrowing, slithering priest! I for one would gladly choose to die with a war hammer in my hand, not slapping my head and begging the Earth Elders for forgiveness!”

  “Gentlemen . . . brothers,” said Cinnabar, spreading his arms. “This is not right . . .”

/>   “Stop. You did not let me finish, Brother Nickel,” Vansen said loudly. He wished that convincing the others, as difficult as it would be, was the hardest part of what he envisioned. “I do not intend to defeat the Qar because, as I said, we cannot defeat them. We cannot even hope to hold them back for very long. But I know a little of what they want here, and I may know some things even their leader does not yet know—important things.” Still, even the mere thought of the Qar’s dark lady made him weak with fear—he had seen her in so many of his nightmares, visions left in his head by Gyir’s thoughts like shadows cast on the wall of a cave. He was terrified to face her, but what else could he do? He was a soldier, and he had given his loyalty to these folk as completely as he had to the Eddon family and their throne when he first became a royal guard. “Here is my plan,” he announced as the others at last fell silent. “I intend to make peace.”

  “Peace!” barked Copper. “With the Twilight People? With ettins and skinshifters? That is madness.”

  Vansen’s smile was grim. “If so, then madness is the only thing that can save us.”

  An isolated sliver of moon hung in the sky as they crept out the side door of Chaven’s observatory beside the old walls. Chert had not smelled open air for weeks and for a moment the sharpness of it was almost overwhelming. He took a couple of reeling steps, light-headed, before finding his balance. The night seemed . . . so big!

  Flint did not seem to notice. He looked briefly to either side and then trotted down the steps. At the bottom of the stairwell he turned to follow the road beside the wall, headed directly toward Skimmer’s Lagoon as though he could see it. Chert could not suppress a shiver of fear. How did the boy know things like this? It made no sense—in fact, it refuted good sense entirely.