by Tad Williams
Unexpectedly, she laughed. “Come, then!” she called to the surrounding Qar, who banged spears and swords against their shields or threw back their heads and bayed up at the cavern’s ceiling and the moon hidden so far above it, the moon that was in their blood as the Fireflower was in Barrick’s. “The hour is upon us! The last of the old years begins to die tonight! Let us show this presumptuous mortal king how the People dance at Midsummer!”
With a shout the Qar leaped forward and raced across the cavern toward the southerners stepping off their boats along the near shore, soldiers as numerous as ants. The Xixians were already nocking arrows and bending bows, waiting for the Qar to come in range.
“Midsummer!” cried Barrick, and the voices within him wept and exulted.
Ferras Vansen had been in battles both fierce and frightening. He had stood with his master Donal Murroy against both bandits and rebels. While scouting he had hidden in a tree for half an agonizing day, knowing that even the slightest noise or movement could bring death because a troop of mercenaries had camped almost directly beneath him. He had disarmed a maddened Southmarch guardsman who had killed his own wife and their four children, wrestling with the man in the smeared blood of his dead family. He had fought the Qar themselves on battlefields as strange as nightmares—but nothing had prepared him for this final deadly struggle deep beneath Southmarch.
By the time Vansen and those Funderlings still able to fight made their way down the cliff, the Qar and their small, silent queen had already flung themselves at the first of the autarch’s men to land on the shore. Vansen could not see well enough to guess who was getting the best of things because the light in the monstrous chamber had begun to flicker and gleam as colors he could scarcely recognize pulsed in the depths of the Shining Man the way red heat rippled in the embers of a fire.
“Double-fast, men!” Vansen shouted. “Otherwise the fairies may not leave us any!”
“Ha!” Malachite Copper was gasping along beside him. “I knew the Old Ones to be uncanny—I didn’t know they were greedy, too!” Copper’s leg had been injured in the final melee in the Initiation Hall but he was limping along gamely, doing his best to keep up. He had cursed when Vansen suggested he stay behind and tend his wound. “Well, Captain, we will just have to take what they leave us.”
Vansen looked back. The Funderlings following were wide-eyed with something more than fright, a look that seemed to search beyond the moment and perhaps even beyond their own short mortal lives. Weighted down with weapons and armor, none of them much more than half Ferras Vansen’s size, they still hurried to keep up with him, as if after all they had suffered they remained intent on proving themselves. “Sledge Jasper would be proud of you,” he called to them now. “He is watching!”
“Make your Wardthane proud, boys!” gasped Malachite Copper, stumbling for a moment in his weariness. They had reached the outskirts of the fighting, a twilight world of unsteady shapes locked in struggle as the stones overhead glowed and then darkened, glowed and then darkened.
“At them!” Vansen’s heart was strangely full here at the end, despite all that he had lost, all that he had never had. “At them, my brave men!”
To Beetledown’s astonishment, the queen of the Rooftoppers herself was waiting for him when he reached the stables in the ruins of Wolfstooth Spire. His favorite mount Muckle Brown had been saddled and was scratching impatiently—a fine, strong young female flittermouse, dark as sweet ale and almost as large as a pigeon—but Beetledown had eyes only for his mistress.
“Majesty.” He bowed as low as he could. “You do us too thickish an honor.”
“Nonsense.” Upsteeplebat smiled. “You are the best of my scouts, Beetledown. Still, we must not waste time in talk. If the Funderling Chert Blue Quartz says that the hour grows short, then you must fly now into the depths to find this man Cinnabar. Are you ready?”
“Directly, Ma’am,” he said. “I had but my oilcloth to fasten tight—some of the ways lie through curtains of water tall as one of the castle doors!”
“I wish I had seen it as you have, brave Beetledown.”
“If . . . if all goes well,” he said, “perhaps Your Majesty would do me the honor of letting me be your guide. I wot well that my friend Chert and un’s kind would be only too proud to show you the great caverns.”
The queen’s pretty face grew solemn. “And I would love to be shown them. It is a promise, then. If all goes well, you will show me some of these places you have seen, my brave scout.”
He feared he would burst out singing at the honor. “Too kind you are, Exquisite Majesty.” He finished lashing the oilcloth cloak close around him—it would not do to have anything dangling when he flew through those tight, dark spaces—and then moved toward Muckle Brown, who hunched between her folded wings and stared at the Rooftopper with the cross, bleary expression of a child awakened too early from a nap. Beetledown climbed onto her lushly furred back and sat patiently as the grooms tied him into the saddle and put the rein-rings in his hand.
“Ah!” said Queen Upsteeplebat suddenly. “Do not forget your blade, brave Beetledown!”
“Blade?” He shook his head. “I fear you mistake me for another, Majesty. I have never ...”
“Never until now. But you have shown yourself not just a brave Gutter-Scout but a queen’s paladin as well, and the traditional gift is . . . a sword.” She clapped her hands and a small page came forward, carrying the sword as if it were made of precious jewels—which, in a way, it was. The silver thing was as slender as a cat’s whisker and sharper than a bee’s curved barb, its hilt wrapped in golden thread. “This is the needle of Queen Sanasu herself, dropped beneath her chair in the Long Ago. Take it, Beetledown. Serve your friend Chert well, and you will serve us all well.”
He knew if he spoke much more he would say something foolish. He leaned down and took the sword from her dainty hand, then thrust it through the strap over his shoulder so that the hilt bobbed near his head and the pointy end did not trouble the flittermouse. “Thank you, Majesty.” He signaled to the grooms who undid the bat’s fetters and stepped away sharply to avoid being nipped. The big mounts were notoriously ill-tempered when kept from flying at night, and sundown had passed hours ago. Feeling her freedom, Muckle Brown leaped out through the arched window of the belfry and into the black sky.
Beetledown prodded his mount with his heels; the bat turned up her wing and swept toward the wall of the inner keep, then over it, swimming through the air in brisk strokes followed by long, gliding moments where nothing moved but the air rushing past. He gave the bat a little more heel and then pulled on the rein. She swung high up into the air, banked so that for a moment it seemed even the moon was below them, then dropped down like a stone, spreading her wings only as the ground rushed so close that Beetledown held his breath.
A moment later they were through the gates of Funderling Town and skimming beneath the carved ceiling that was as lively as an upside-down world. Beetledown only knew one route into the Mysteries, the long and dangerous one Chert had shown him. He could only pray to the Lord of the Peak that he could do what had been asked of him in time.
Ferras Vansen felt as though he were nothing but an eye—as if none of his own sinew and bone remained except that organ of sight. Even the sounds of combat had become so unrelenting that they dulled almost to silence; faces slid past him like the faces of ghosts in a dream, angry, frightened, some even familiar, but he had no time for ordinary thought. He was in the middle of a storm of injury and death and could consider little beyond survival.
The Xixians on the far side of the Sea in the Depths had lined up their archers, and as the first of their manufactured boats reached the shore where Ferras Vansen, the Funderlings, and the Qar hurried forward, arrows hissed through the air, nearly invisible in the unsteady light. One of the Funderlings just in front of Vansen dropped with a shaft in his neck; another went down with one in the meaty part of his thigh. The first man was dead already, but Vans
en dropped to the rocky cavern floor beside the second man and removed the arrow as carefully as he could, then tied the man’s belt around his leg to stop the bleeding before hurrying forward to rejoin the charge.
With his longer legs, Vansen caught up to the vanguard just as they reached the first wave of Xixian irregulars, many of whom were still clambering out of their boats, doing their best to avoid touching the strange silver liquid of the underground ocean or lake. Some of them looked almost like children trying to keep their feet dry as they leaped from the prows of the unsteady boats to the stony beach. It gave Vansen an idea.
“Shove those nearest to the shiny sea back into it!” he shouted. “They are afraid of it!” It only occurred to him a moment later that the Funderlings might be just as frightened. After all, wasn’t this the heart of their religious mysteries?
The Xixian soldiers seemed to be endless, as if the autarch possessed the harvest god Erilo’s magic sack and could simply pour out whatever he wanted. Vansen, Malachite Copper, and half a dozen more Funderlings cut their way into the center of a group of Sanian infantrymen, each of whom carried two spears and small arm-shields that were little more than oversized gauntlets of metal and leather. These nearly unencumbered desert fighters were fast and a difficult match for the Funderlings, who got no particular advantage from being close to the ground. One of the little warriors died when a Saniaman threw one of his spears before the groups had even clashed; moments later a belch of fire on the far side of the Sea in the Depths was followed by a vast eruption of dirt and stone as the cannonball struck the ground near Malachite Copper. Two Funderlings were flung through the air, broken and bleeding; Copper himself was lucky to get away with a dozen new cuts made by flying shards of stone.
The Funderlings had been fighting for hours, first in the Initiation Hall, now here in the glittering semidark. Vansen was exhausted, and he knew his troops were, too. Most of the Xixian soldiers here hadn’t even taken part in the battle for the hall. Not only were there ten times as many of them, they were all rested.
Unless we can find another way, we’ve lost, Vansen thought desperately as he gave ground against a tall, grinning Saniaman whose face was a mass of dark tattoos and who used his twin spears so cleverly that it was like fighting two men. Vansen had to make certain there was no one behind him while he concentrated on this nimble enemy, so he backed away from Copper and the others, trying to find an open spot. Even if we are in the last hours of Midsummer, it doesn’t matter—the autarch must already be on that island and he’s almost certainly begun whatever he means to do. The thought spread through him like a poison, distracting him so that a sudden lunge by the half-naked Sanian soldier nearly caught him in the belly. He quickly brought up his shield and gave a little more ground.
Vansen saw that he was being forced too far from his fellows: even if he managed to kill his man, he would have a hard time finding his way back to the relative safety of numbers. The man lunged again, but it was a feint; a moment later, he swiped with his other short, flexible spear, trying to rattle Vansen’s helmet or even knock it to the side a little to blind him, but Vansen managed to get the edge of his shield up and deflect it, then spun back out of the way of a second, more serious thrust.
The tattooed spearman laughed, a shrill, disturbing sound. Drunk, perhaps, or drugged. They said the Xixian priests gave their men potions to make them fearless. Some opponents found it terrifying, no doubt, but Vansen found it made him burn with anger. Was he a peasant, to be cowed by some giggling foreign savage while defending his own home?
An arrow snapped past the Saniaman and Vansen both, and in the instant’s distraction, Vansen leaped forward, swinging his shield into the man’s face while turning sideways to avoid the inevitable thrust of at least one of the spears. The spearhead darted out at him like a serpent, but he sucked in his belly and threw his weight behind the shield, bearing the man backward so that it was all the southerner could do to keep his feet, his arms helplessly flying out to either side for balance. In that moment Vansen kicked out and swept the man’s nearest foot off the ground, then put his knee into the man’s groin and fell on top of him, staying inside the circle of the reach of the two spears. Before the Saniaman could do more than try to grapple with the weight on top of him, Vansen let go of his shield and pulled his dagger from his belt. By the time the Sanian fighter had shoved the shield aside, Vansen had already struck him twice in the guts with the knife. The man’s eyes widened and his mouth stretched as though he would scream, but Vansen kept pounding the blade into his middle and the man vomited blood instead.
Vansen climbed to his feet as the man still lay scraping with his fingers at the stony ground as though he might dig his way to safety. He stepped on the fellow’s head and pressed down until he heard the man’s jaw snap, then stood up and looked around.
A squad of the autarch’s Leopards had set up on the far side of the silver sea and were beginning to fire their long rifles, each shot accompanied by a clot of smoke, so that within moments the men seemed to crouch beneath a tiny thunderstorm. The rifle balls traveled far too fast to be seen, but their handiwork was all too apparent: nearly every shot threw a Funderling to the ground or ripped into one of the Qar. Vansen even saw one of the few remaining Ettins fall back with half his head shot away. Had there been more Leopards, or had they been able to load their filigreed rifles faster, the battle would have ended quickly. Even so, the Leopards and their guns were keeping the Funderlings and Qar from outflanking the Xixian irregulars so that the allies would have to continue taking on the autarch’s strength face-to-face.
Vansen had just begun to form an idea about how to attack this hopeless situation when Barrick Eddon came running to him across the uneven stones, the prince’s pale face smeared with blood from some small wound, his helmet in his hand and his curly red hair flying, so that for a moment he looked to Vansen like some freakish, supernatural creature, an armored demon with his entire head on fire. It still startled Vansen how tall the boy had grown, how he seemed to have aged years in the matter of a single season.
“We are trapped here, Captain—the hour is almost on us!” Barrick shouted. Arrows sped past him but he did not seem to notice. “If we remain, we have lost!”
“But what else can we do, Highness?”
Barrick laughed, a harsh, wild sound. “I saw you look at the boats, Vansen. You were already thinking it! Come, while Saqri and the others can yet hold the center and distract them. She has told me that in a moment she will stage her play!”
Vansen had no idea what Barrick meant by that, but the prince was right. They had thought of the same thing. They could not fight their way through the Xixian defense by strength alone, but if someone reached the autarch and put a blade or an arrow in him the day might still be saved.
“Which one, Highness? The one on the end?” Vansen knew that they had to stay as far from the center of the fight as possible. If the riflemen on the far side noticed them floating unprotected, they would never reach the other shore. “I’ll go—but for the love of the gods, put your helmet back on!”
Vansen and the prince hurried down the sloping shore in a prolonged and painful series of crouches—painful for Vansen, anyway. To his astonishment, Barrick Eddon had not only grown in size, he had grown in strength and grace as well, and even seemed to be freely using the arm Vansen had been told was forever crippled. What had happened to that sulking, red-faced child of a few months ago after Vansen himself had fallen into the dark in Greatdeeps?
He hunched as low as he could while a volley of arrows snapped overhead, the sound of their passing made almost inaudible by the clamor of voices and crash of guns in the great cavern. As he did so, a strange, unexpected thought came to him. Despite the terrible danger all around them, Barrick Eddon was alive and well and had returned to Southmarch. Which meant that Ferras Vansen had not failed Barrick’s sister, Princess Briony, after all. He might not have carried the prince to Southmarch all by himself, but he had he
lped to keep him alive. If Vansen lived, unlikely as that was, one day she might release him from her scorn.
Suddenly his heart felt as light as the poets often claimed, light as a bit of down caught on the puff of someone’s lips. He had not failed, although so many times he had been certain he had done so. However little Briony Eddon’s curses and scorn of him might have meant to her, they had meant the world to Ferras Vansen, had lain upon him as heavily as stone. Now that weight was gone.
“Hurry,” Barrick shouted. “Saqri has begun!”
A sound rose behind them, a weird and beautiful moan like the howl of a wolf given words. The queen of the fairies had climbed over the backs of her own soldiers to engage the enemy, her sword sparkling and darting like a hummingbird in a pool of sunlight. It was her voice that rose above the clamor of battle. Saqri had become the focus of nearly all eyes. Her long, slender blade struck and struck again. She danced through the Xixians like smoke, and for that moment they fell back from her in astonishment. Through it all, Saqri kept singing.
Vansen heard a noise and dragged his attention back to his own situation. Two Xixian soldiers left to guard the farthest boat were hurrying forward to intercept Vansen and the prince. He ducked a swipe from one guard’s sword, stumbled and rolled, then came up to find the man coming back at him again. At that same moment Barrick Eddon dodged past his own man, snatched the rifle from the man’s hands just as the Xixian was lowering it to shoot, and then whirled and hit him from behind with the gun hard enough that the man’s chin snapped down against his chest. Before that man had even fallen to the ground, Barrick turned and threw the gun at the other guard like a short spear. It hit the southerner in the head and knocked him onto his back, bloodied and dying. Vansen gaped at the men Barrick Eddon had so effortlessly bested as the prince made his way to the grounded reed boat.