by Tad Williams
He leaned back to the crevice, sniffing. He could detect another smell as well—something of the sea, which must be air drifting down from the surface above—but it was the scent he identified with the silvery pool that was most noticeable. He would have to ask Cinnabar what it could be.
“Come on,” he said to the boy. “Up now and let’s go back to the temple.”
Flint did his best, but he was weak and could hardly stand. He was too big to be carried on Chert’s back, but Chert found that if he let the boy lean on him they could make slow but steady time. They would be late for supper, though. At another time that would have made him very bitter indeed, but the fright the boy had given him, coupled with the strange smell of the Sea in the Depths, had largely taken away Chert’s appetite.
It made him think again about the strangeness of this little world beneath Southmarch—a world not only vaster and more complicated than the Big Folk living on the surface dreamed, but clearly more than even Chert and the other Funderlings realized. If the Sea in the Depths vented to the surface, as it must then the opening should be somewhere within the walls of Southmarch Castle. Nothing strange about that—the limestone of Midlan’s Mount was full of holes, and there were many such cracks that kept air moving through Funderling Town and the depths, otherwise so many people could not have made their home there—but for reasons he could not even begin to guess, the knowledge that there was only air between the Shining Man and the surface of the world now troubled Chert’s thoughts like an ache.
Getting past Five Arches seemed to do much for Flint’s strength: by the time they were making their way up the lower Cascade Stair he was able to walk unsupported, although he was still short of breath and had to stop often to rest.
“I’m sorry, Father,” he said during one such pause, “I was . . . I thought I was dying. But it also felt like someone I loved was leaving me—as if you or Mama Opal were going away.”
“Never mind, Son. You’ll feel better with some soup in you. No shame in any case—those are strange passages down there, everyone knows it.”
As they approached the temple along the path through the ceremonial fungus gardens they saw a bulky shape standing at a point where two paths crossed, looking down at a lacework of white fungal strings that had been induced to grow over a frame in the shape of the sacred mattock. As they drew closer, Chert began to think he recognized who stood there.
“Chaven? Is that you? Chaven!” He hurried forward. “Praise the Elders, you’re back!”
The physician turned, his face mild and smiling. “Yes, I am,” he said, but with the air of someone who has only been out for a short walk.
“Where did you go?”
Chaven looked past him to the place where Flint had stopped in the middle of the path. The boy seemed in no hurry to come closer. “Hello, lad. Hmm, where did I go?” He nodded as though the question was a wise one, one that required proper thought instead of a rushed answer. “Out to the passages beyond Five Arches. Yes.”
“We just came back from there. How did we miss you? Have you been back long?”
Still the mild, surprised look. “I was . . . you know, I cannot completely recall. I was looking into some ideas . . . some . . . thoughts . . . that I had.” He frowned a little, in the way of someone who has just remembered an undone errand. “Yes, I had some thinking to do, and I just . . . wandered.”
Chert was going to question him further, determined to get some better answers than this unsatisfying fare, when one of the monks suddenly appeared at the top of the path, waving both arms and clearly excited.
“Blue Quartz, is that you? Come quickly! We are invaded.”
“Invaded?” Chert felt terror rise inside him. Would there never be any peace? Did this mean Vansen had failed?
“Yes,” the monk said. “It is dreadful. There are women everywhere!”
“What? Women? What are you talking about?”
“Women from Funderling Town. The magister’s wife and all, they just arrived. Dozens of them! The temple isn’t meant for all these women!”
Chert laughed in relief. “Yes, you brothers are in for it now, you poor scrapers!” He turned to Flint. “That means our Opal’s come back, too. Come on, boy.”
As they followed the anxious monk, Chaven fell a few steps behind them as if still pleasantly distracted by his thoughts.
Flint leaned close to Chert. “He’s not telling the truth,” the boy whispered. He did not sound as if he disapproved, but instead simply reported dry fact. “Not all of it. He’s hiding something important from us.”
“I had the same feeling,” murmured Chert. Up ahead, monks swarmed the colonnade in front of the temple like mice escaping a cat. “The same feeling. And I do not like it at all.”
So I’m back in armor again, thought Ferras Vansen with weary amusement as he adjusted the byrnie the Funderlings had given him, a chain-mail shirt made from a surprisingly delicate series of barred links that was so light it scarcely needed any underpadding. Ah, well, at least I didn’t have enough time to grow used to freedom.
“I packed some food, as you asked, Captain,” said Brother Antimony. “Some bread and cheese and a couple of onions. Oh, and we are lucky—look!” The monk held out an open sack. “Old Man’s Ears!”
For a moment Vansen’s stomach threatened to crawl up his throat and leap out of his mouth. Then he realized that although the things in Antimony’s bag did look like fleshy, shriveled ears, they were in fact some kind of mushroom. Still, they smelled very strange, dark and damp and musty; Vansen found it difficult to muster much enthusiasm. “Yes. Splendid.”
“I still don’t think this is a good idea, Captain,” Cinnabar told him. “Let us at least send a dozen men with you. Jasper is up and around.”
“Yes, take me, Captain.” Sledge Jasper’s bald head was so cut and bruised it looked like it had been carved from marble. “I’ll do for some of those meadow-dancers. Yes, I wouldn’t mind killing a few more at all.”
“Which is why this isn’t the mission for you,” Vansen said. “I wouldn’t waste our best fighter when I don’t want a fight. They need you more here.”
“But we need you here, Vansen,” said Malachite Copper. “That is the most important truth.”
“You must trust me, gentlemen—I can do more good this way. Would you rather have me here waiting to defend against another attack, or out making sure there are no more attacks?”
Cinnabar shook his head. “That is chop-logic—those are not the only two possible outcomes. You might be killed without any bargain made. Then we have neither a defender nor a peacemaker.”
“Not a very cheerful thought, Magister, but I must chance the odds. I am the only person who can do this, you must believe me. And if I take too many men with me, I will not only leave your defenses compromised, but increase the chance my mission will be seen as an attack. My only hope is to speak to their leader, face to face.” He turned to Antimony. “I admire the rope around the prisoner, Brother—we must certainly keep him tied to us—but I would rather see it around his ankle than his waist. If he tries to get away I want to be able to jerk him off his feet.” He looked sternly at the drow, who, although he could not understand Vansen’s words, could certainly understand his tone. The bearded little man cringed in fear, baring his snaggy yellow teeth.
They did not linger in the leavetaking: Vansen knew Cinnabar and the others did not agree with him, and he felt bad himself that he had to take Antimony, a very well-liked fellow. It was possible another of the Funderling monks might be able to translate, but he trusted young Antimony to keep his head in a crisis, and despite his own show of confidence he knew he had only a very small chance of achieving his goal without something going wrong.
The drow, who still seemed to fear some kind of treachery by his captors, trudged ahead on his short length of rope, leading them up into the Festival Halls, back to the spot where the Qar had broken through. Cinnabar’s men had almost finished filling the space where t
he Qar had dug their way in, stacking rock so expertly that it was impossible to get past. Vansen was taken aback—he had forgotten that the breach was being repaired. How would they get to the Qar? Not by any surface route, that was certain: if the confused bits of news that had trickled down to Funderling Town and thence to the temple were true, aboveground the siege had turned into a full-bore invasion. He and Antimony would never survive an attempt to reach the Qar that way.
It would take hours to shift the stone again here—hours these Funderlings should be spending improving the defenses elsewhere instead of undoing and redoing their work. Ferras Vansen leaned against the wall, suddenly weary beyond words. Commander? General? He wasn’t even fit for his old post as guard captain.
The drow looked the repairs up and down, then looked at Vansen. He said something in his harsh, gulping tongue.
“He says . . . I think he says there is another way to reach his camp from here,” Antimony told Vansen.
“Another way? The Qar have another way into our caverns?” He stared at the little bearded man. “Why would he surrender that secret to us?”
“He is afraid if we turn back now the rest of my people will lose patience with him and kill him. He says the hairless one—Jasper, of course—was . . . making gestures.” Antimony suppressed a smile. “Making it clear that he would be happy to wring this one’s neck . . . or worse.”
“I’ll wager he was.” Vansen nodded. “Yes, tell him we will let him show us the way.”
“He asks only one thing. He begs you not to tell Lady Porcupine that he showed you a path you did not already know. He says that would mean an ending for him more terrible than anything even the hairless one could imagine.”
33
Caged Children
“Rhantys, who claimed to speak with fairies himself, says that the Qar queen is known as the First Flower because she is the mother of the entire race. Rhantys even suggests her name, Sakuri, comes from a Qar word meaning ‘Endlessly Fertile,’ but the absence of a Qar grammar means this is hard to prove or disprove.”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
IT WAS NOT THAT PINIMMON VASH disliked children. He had always kept dozens of them as slaves, especially for his closest needs. All boys, of course—he found girls unsatisfying and inadequate. Still, he had young female slaves among his household as well. No one could claim he had anything against children. But it was the strange pointlessness of these particular children he found disconcerting.
Not to mention all the work it had caused him. It was one thing to deal with the autarch’s ordinary moods, his sudden urges to eat bizarre foods or to hear some exotic style of music or experiment with some ancient, near-forgotten form of interrogation. That was well within the ordinary scope of Vash’s job; he had performed such services for other autarchs before this one. In fact, he prided himself on his skill at foreseeing such requests and having at least the beginnings of fulfilling them at all times. But Sulepis made even his grandfather Parak, a man of wild appetites and fancies, seem as staid as the oldest and most constipated priest in the great temple. And now . . .
“Go ashore with a troop of soldiers,” the autarch had told him when they made land at Orms, a city in the marshy Helobine country south of Brenland, and began trading with the locals to refresh the ship’s supplies of fresh food and water. “Go some miles outside the walls—I do not wish to waste my time fighting with these people, and if I set my men on the city I will have to let them off the leash and then we will be here days and days. So take your men out to the countryside and bring me back children. Alive. A hundred should do ...”
There had been no further explanation, of course, nor instruction: there seldom was with this autarch.
Seize one hundred children from their homes. Bring them back to the ship. House them, feed them—keep them alive and more or less well. But am I told why? No, of course not. Ask no questions, Vash. You may be the autarch’s oldest and must trusted adviser, but you deserve no courtesies, he told himself sourly. Just do as you are told.
The paramount minister walked one last time around the section of the hold that had been boxed in with lashed staves to make a cage for the young prisoners. A dozen were housed here, the rest scattered out over several other ships. Feeding them was not the problem, Vash thought as he examined their pale faces, so confused, sullen, or blankly terrified. But keeping them alive—how was he supposed to do that? Already several of them were running at the nose and coughing. A cage in the hold was not a very warm place to house a dozen half-naked children, but would the autarch understand that if a sudden fever ran them through them and took them all? He would not.
No, then it’ll be my head, Vash thought gloomily. He stared at a weeping boy and wished he could reach through the bars and hit the child to make it stop crying. And even if I am lucky and manage to keep them alive for whatever madness he plans, what next? What next, Pinimmon?
The autarch’s parade of strange whims continued. They had started off from Hierosol in a single ship, but many more ships from the Xixian navy had caught up and joined them during the voyage, all loaded with soldiers. Now, after the fleet had skirted Brenland and passed through the Connord Straits, they landed in a shallow bay in the wild lands along the eastern border of Helmingsea. This was as much of a surprise to Pinimmon Vash as the order to capture one hundred children. He was increasingly convinced that his master was deliberately leaving him in the dark about the most important parts of this weird venture.
Stranger still, a troop of the autarch’s fierce White Hound soldiers and their horses now went ashore in boats. They rode off west into the forest and had not returned when the autarch told the captain to weigh anchor. The fleet was still many leagues from Southmarch, their apparent destination, so Vash could not even guess at what mission the White Hounds had been left behind to fulfill.
“Let us be honest with each other, Olin,” Sulepis said, “as men of learning and brother monarchs, if nothing else.” Now that they were at sea again, sweeping along the coast toward their destination, the autarch was in an expansive mood. He was standing so near the railing—and the condemned northern king—that Vash could almost feel the anxiety of his Leopard bodyguards, who were watching the situation with the fixed, predatory stares of their namesakes. “Most of what we are told of the gods by priests, by the sacred books, is nonsense,” he continued. “These are tales for children.”
“Perhaps that is true for the tales of your god,” Olin said stiffly, “but that does not mean I so lightly throw away the wisdom of our church ...”
“So you believe everything your Book of the Trigon tells you? About women turned to lizards for spurning the gods’ advances? About Volos Longbeard drinking the ocean?”
“The intentions of gods are not for us to judge, nor what they can accomplish if they choose.”
“Ah, yes. On this we are agreed, King Olin.” The autarch smiled. “You do not find the subject interesting? Then let me speak of more specific things. Your family has a certain invisible . . . deformity. A stain, as it were. I think you know what I mean.”
Olin was clearly furious but he kept his voice even. “Stain? There is no stain on the Eddons. Just because you have the power to kill me, sir, does not mean you have the right to insult my family and my blood. We were kings in Connord before we came to the March Kingdoms, and we were chieftains before we were kings.”
The autarch looked amused. “No stain, is it? Not of character or of body? Very well, then, let me tell you a little of what I have learned. If you still say I am wrong when I’ve finished—why, on my oath, I might even apologize. That would be entertaining, wouldn’t it, Vash?”
The paramount minister had no idea what Sulepis wanted him to say, but his master was clearly waiting for an answer. “Very entertaining, Golden One. But astonishingly unlikely.”
“But let me tell you a little of my own journey first, Olin. Perhaps that will give you some idea of what I mean.
You will be interested too, Lord Vash. No one else in all Xis has heard this tale, except for Panhyssir.”
His rival’s name was like a hot coal dropped down his collar, but Vash did his best to smile and look gratified. At least the high priest was elsewhere; otherwise, the humiliation would have been even more excruciating. “I listen eagerly for whatever wisdom my lord wishes to share.”
“Of course you do.” Sulepis seemed to be enjoying himself: his long-boned face kept creasing in wide, crocodilian smiles and his unusual eyes seemed even more lively than usual. “Of course you do.
“I have know that I was not as other children since I was very young. Not simply that I was the son of an autarch, because I was raised with dozens of others who could claim the same thing. But ever since I was a small boy I have heard and seen things that others could not see. After a while I came to realize that I, of all my brothers, could actually sense the presence of the gods themselves. Truly, every autarch claims to hear the speech of the gods, but I could tell that even for my father Parnad these were empty words.
“Not so for me.
“But here was a strange thing! All of the other royal sons and I were the children of the god-on-earth—yet only I could sense the presence of the gods! Stranger still, I had no greater power than this one small gift. The gods had given me no greater strength than other mortals, no longer life, nothing! And clearly the same was true of my father as well, and all his other heirs. The autarch of Xis was nothing but an ordinary man! His blood was ordinary blood. All that we had been taught was a lie, but only I had the courage to acknowledge it.”
Vash had never heard so much blasphemy spoken—and it was being spoken by the autarch himself! What did that mean? How was he supposed to react? Indifferent as he largely was to religion, except insofar as it was the steady heartbeat of Xixian court etiquette, still Vash could not help cringing, wondering if any moment the great god himself might not strike them all down with his fiery rays. Clearly, every worry he had entertained about the autarch’s sanity had been justified!