by Tad Williams
But his command over Muckle Brown was more than a matter of pride, it was a matter of life and death—especially now. The farther into the depths he flew, the more the fetid air began to affect him as it had when Chert had first brought him down. He was already finding it hard to keep his mind on his journey, and each time his mount flew into a cold downdraft and dropped suddenly, or banked and turned him upside down in a matter of a single pulse, Beetledown felt himself less and less in control of either the flittermouse or himself.
Tha hast promised, he kept telling himself. Tha hast promised Chert the Funderling and thy queen. Beest tha the man thy father named! But it had already taken him an hour and more simply to find his way across Funderling Town and through the dark passages beyond the Silk Door, as Chert had once shown him, and more time had passed since then. It was work to stay alert, work to stay balanced on Muckle Brown’s velvety back, and Beetledown had already been wearied by days of constant riding and flying when the queen’s order had come. As the flittermouse plunged deeper and deeper into the pestilent depths he was finding it very difficult to stay awake.
A new smell tickled his nose, distant but unmistakable, and with it came a gradually swelling murmur, like the sound of ocean that echoed deep in the Royal Spindle Shell. The murmur continued to get louder even as the air itself grew thicker, until the report of his addled senses began to make him think that he and his mount had somehow turned downside-up: surely a roar like that could only come from the great ocean itself! But how could that be? Could he have so badly lost his way?
No, he decided a moment later, that be no smell of good and honest ocean. He had encountered the thick, cloying scent before, if not the noise. No proper sea that, but Chert’s foul silvery pond in the earth’s heart.
But where did this scent and the sounds come from? He was still far from the Metamorphic Brothers’ temple, let alone the distant deeps to which Chert had sent him—and his time to reach them was also dwindling, he had no doubt.
He hesitated for only a moment before pulling on the reins and leaning to bank the flittermouse hard. Beetledown and the bat sailed on, farther and farther away from the one path he knew. After passing through a long and intricate series of narrow places, one of which was a crevice too tight to fly through, so he had to get out and lead the balking Muckle Brown through it, he began to smell the odd salt-and-metal scent stronger than ever. The echoes changed, too, the murmur spreading to take up space in what was clearly a huge, wide cavern.
But if we are so far from the ocean still, why does it roar so?
He pushed down on the stirrups; the bat dipped her head and dove, spiraling down so quickly that Beetledown could feel the air press his ears until they ached. For what seemed a very long time they swept downward through the vast, vertical tunnel until, with no warning, they dropped out of extended darkness and into a massive cavern whose dimly glowing stones burst out before his dazzled eyes like the stars themselves. For a moment even Muckle Brown was disoriented: the bat hit a wall of cold air and suddenly tumbled into a dive. Only as they plummeted toward the surging, bellowing shapes beneath them—the source, he now realized, of the roar his clouded wits had mistaken for the sea—did he pull the flittermouse back into his control.
Beetledown skimmed the great cavern once, twice, thrice, trying to make sense of what he saw. Many men hurried like ants across an island in the middle of the silvery lake. Some of these appeared to be defending the island against a motley assortment of creatures, many of which looked to be Funderlings, or at least were of a size to be. These must be his quarry, Beetledown decided, but he could not simply drop into the middle of a deadly struggle and expect to survive.
He circled until he found a small group of Funderlings who were snatching a moment of rest on the outskirts of the fighting. He brought Muckle Brown down in their midst. One or two of them started back in surprise, but the rest of the bloodied, filthy little men barely even looked up at his sudden arrival.
“Have a message for Cinnabar, I do!” Beetledown shouted as loud as he could, hoping they could hear him and would not simply swat him or his mount dead. His flittermouse did not like to be surrounded by these giant shapes, and it was all Beetledown could do to hold her down; he could hear the bat’s protests at the edge of his hearing, a shrill and angry squealing. But the Funderlings, overcome by exhaustion, only stared at him.
“I need Cinnabar the Magister!” he shouted. “Lord of the Peak blast your ears clean, can none of you hear me? Cinnabar! I am Beetledown the Bowman and I bring a message from Chert Blue Quartz!”
One of the Funderlings pointed back toward the stony cliffs at the edge of the great cavern. “Magister’s with his boy,” he said. “He’s the one in armor. Look for him there.”
“I thank ’ee, good sir.” Beetledown touched the brim of his hat and kicked at Muckle Brown’s ribs. They vaulted into the air. One swift circle to orient himself, then he turned the bat toward the base of the cliffs.
He found Cinnabar sitting propped against a large stone amid a dozen of his wounded comrades. An even smaller Funderling lay beside him, pale and motionless. Beetledown landed only a short distance away, but Cinnabar did not turn from his sorrowful contemplation of the silent child.
Beetledown stood in the stirrups and waved his hands.
“Hear me! I come from Chert Blue Quartz! Are you Cinnabar the Magister?”
The wounded Funderling nodded but did not look up. “I am . . . for a little while longer. Then the Elders will decide.” He reached out his hand to touch the boy’s slack face. “They have killed my son. They have killed my dear Calomel . . . !”
Beetledown shook his head. “May the Lord lift him up. I grieve your loss and beg pardon, Magister, but my errand cannot wait.”
Cinnabar glanced at him without curiosity. “What can any errand matter now? Can’t you see we’ve lost everything?”
“Mayhap. Mayhap not.” Beetledown urged the bat nearer, and Muckle Brown reluctantly crawled toward Cinnabar. “But I am sworn to it. Now list. Chert says to tell ’ee that Brother Nickel has stopped un—that Chert cannot go forward to do what was planned.”
Cinnabar looked at him for a moment, his eyes dull and his face weary. “It was a foolish hope, anyway. Did you truly come all that way just to tell me of this failure?”
“No!” Beetledown was feeling the press of time very strongly now. “The Astion, Chert said. Send the Astion and still there may be hope.”
“Ah. Hope.” Cinnabar’s mouth twitched—the faint ghost of a smile. “The Astion, is it? Even at the end the Guild will have their rules followed.” He reached to his belt and drew out a leather purse, then shook its contents onto the stone of the cavern floor. Beetledown waited impatiently, listening to the sounds of men fighting and dying on the other side of the massive cavern. The Funderling picked up a shiny circle of black stone etched with a six-pointed star and extended it toward Beetledown. “Can you carry it?”
“If tha canst put un in the pack on my back,” the Rooftopper said, “then I can carry un.”
“Go then . . . but it will not matter,” said Cinnabar. “We are too few, the southerners too many, and we and the Qar spent too much of our strength on each other. Now we are all dead.”
But Beetledown could no longer hear him: he and his mount were already rising toward the vast chimney and the upper levels of the Mysteries.
There was no time now to return the Astion to Chert on the surface. Beetledown the Bowman knew he would have to fly directly up the great chimney to Funderling Town and hope that he could use Chert’s map to find Chert’s friend Brother Antimony from there, and that Antimony himself would be able to do what must be done. But even as they flew, Beetledown was weighed down by grief. What he had seen in the great cavern beneath the earth stank of failure and defeat.
Last hours of all, mayhap, he thought. For all of us. At least I must do my duty and make Lord of the Peak proud of me.
As he soared upward toward the cle
aner air, he didn’t see the black shape detach itself from the perch where it had waited, brooding and patient. The great gray owl banked in gentle circles until Beetledown and the flittermouse had rounded a bend on their upward flight, then it flapped its wings and followed them, eyes glinting orange even in the near-darkness.
For just that moment their gazes met, then the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl called out Barrick’s name, convulsed, and collapsed. The Fireflower chorus went quiet in his head. He could hear only one voice—hers.
Barrick . . . ! Wordless now, dwindling as though a harsh wind swept it away. Barrick, it’s ... the fire . . .
And then one more voice, his own, drifting up out of the new silence inside him like a forgotten prisoner in a deep cell. Qinnitan . . . !
For just an instant he felt what she did—her terrible fear as the end came, the desperate spark of her bravery. And for just that instant, he felt the ice inside him melt away, the hardness that had separated him from his own heart. He was free again, naked of everything, even the Fireflower, but it was a freedom that felt like terrible weakness.
No. Not now. I cannot go back to being that useless thing again . . . ! Barrick forced himself to lift his throbbing head. Strong. Strong . . . ! Qinnitan lay a short distance away, senseless, perhaps even dead. Blood trickled from her nose; one small drop hung poised, ready to fall from her cheek to the rough boards. For a strange moment, he could not pull his eyes away from that drop of blood, imagined it growing and growing into a vast, shiny red sphere, a world of blood into which one could dive and then vanish in living scarlet. . . .
No. He closed his eyes. That was human blood, the same as the thin stuff in his own veins that tried to weaken him. He had to be Qar now.
Barrick tried to stand, but his legs and arms would not support his weight. The Fireflower voices murmured in dismay at his helplessness.
That is how the Dreamers changed me, he realized. They took the old, weak Barrick away and buried him deep inside me. So I could reach Qul-na-Qar. So I could live with the Fireflower. They buried him and built a wall around my heart to keep it strong. And in the midst of everything else—the fetid, bursting air and the chants of the priests and even a dim apprehension of the vast and terrible something lurking behind it all—Barrick felt the poisonous gift of the Dreamers flowing back again to protect him, to make him safe from his own humanity.
They need me—the People need me . . . !
He got his knees beneath him and did his best to rise, his bruised and bleeding limbs as wobbly as those of a newborn colt. A half dozen of the Xixian soldiers fell on him at once and began to push him back down on his face, but the autarch turned and lifted his hand.
“Stand back, Leopards. I will not make the mistake of underestimating you again, Olin’s son. Clearly, your pariki friends have given you some sprinkling of their magicks. Mokori!”
A massive hand closed on the loose mail of Barrick’s armored neck, cutting off his air as it jerked him onto his feet. An instant later, a golden wire thin as a silkworm’s strand dropped over his head and he was pulled back against one of the largest bodies he had ever encountered. The autarch laughed and waved his hand again.
“Do not kill him, Mokori! Olin’s son will play audience. I suspect he may be one of the few people who can understand what is happening.” The autarch stepped back to reveal Barrick’s father, twitching on the ground like a man in the grip of a killing fever.
“Look, Olin—if you still are Olin,” the autarch crowed. “One of your sons has come to watch you play host to Xergal, the god of death and the underworld.”
Each time Barrick moved, the wire tightened around his neck. He didn’t think that in his battered condition he could have fought free anyway—the strangler Mokori was almost as big as Hammerfoot the Ettin—but the sight of his father’s suffering, even through the Dreamers’ deadening spell or whatever they had done to him, made him squirm and struggle despite the noose around his neck.
“Father?” he cried. “Father, can you hear me?” But Olin did not seem even to see him, let alone recognize him. Now Barrick began to feel the greedy joy of the invisible watcher. It fed on misery, somehow—on deceit and shame. That was how it had kept itself alive all these centuries in the dreaming lands . . . alive, perhaps, but not sane.
Suddenly Olin doubled over and fell onto his face, legs kicking like a hanged man’s. The sound that came from the king’s throat was so desperate and horrible that Barrick’s eyes filled with hot tears. Despite all his grievances, despite any wall around his heart, at that moment Barrick would have given his life to save his father from such suffering.
“Midnight is upon us!” cried the autarch. “He comes—the god comes! He enters the vessel!”
“That vessel is a man, curse you to the lowest hells!” Barrick shouted. “He is a king!”
“Come to me, great god—Xergal, or Kernios, or whatever name you wish!” the autarch cried, louder by himself than all the chanting priests combined. “Come to me, Earth Lord—Isolator—Gray Owl—Ageless Pine! I summon you to cross the void! I have made a home for you here!” Both of the autarch’s arms spread wide, as though he welcomed a lover. “Enter and be my servant forever—my slave!”
And then King Olin’s grunts of pain abruptly stopped. Barrick’s father rolled onto his back as though thrown there, and his limbs shot out straight; for a moment his entire body seemed to bulge and distort, rippling from his head to his extremities as though something hot had been poured into his skin.
Barrick heard a shout of misery and recognized it as his own. I’ve failed you all, he thought, battered by the confused and chaotic swell of the Fireflower voices. Failed.
Another cry came, this one from one of the Xixians, then more and more, voices of soldiers and even priests, all rising in fear. Olin’s body rose from the ground like a puppet being lifted by its strings until he stood upright and motionless. All across the platform and on the ground nearby the autarch’s men stumbled back, some making the sign of Nushash with spread fingers like the sun’s rays, others openly weeping with terror, overcome by what was happening in this strange place so very far from home. Olin had become utterly motionless, as if he were some smaller replica of the Shining Man that still loomed over them all, the dark, man-shaped shadow at the center of the island.
“Speak to me, servant,” said the autarch. “Are you indeed the god of the dark earth?” The thing, Barrick saw, did not look much like Olin anymore.
Thin end of the wedge, the awed voices whispered in his thoughts. The crack in it all. The last . . . !
The thing turned its head slowly toward the autarch, and Barrick gasped at how his father’s eyes had changed; whatever looked out of them stared out from a crawling tangle of fiery lines that filled the eyes from lid to lid, a squirming glow that bathed even the king’s brow and face . . . but it still did not speak.
“I said, who are you?” The autarch’s voice had become a little shrill.
“I am he who commands the Owl,” it said in a voice of such musical sweetness that for a moment Barrick almost felt glad that he had tasted so much horror, just to hear it. But even as the words faded, he felt the undertaste of boundless cruelty that was in it and it made his gorge rise. “I am the master of the Knot and keeper of the Pine. I am the Crowfather.”
Sulepis clapped his hands together like a pleased child. “The God of Death—and he is my slave! You are my slave, are you not, Master of the Depths?”
“I am the slave of my summoner as long as he holds me in this world.” Again that beautiful, horrible voice made Barrick want to throw himself at the thing’s feet and beg forgiveness, or hurl himself into the silvery sea to drown. But the most dreadful thing of all was that it was his father’s skin it wore, his father’s face being awkwardly moved by those inhuman emotions. How could he have ever thought he truly hated Olin when seeing this wrenched at his heart so?
“Then you must do what I say! You must!” The autarch closed his eyes an
d went almost completely still as if captured by the transport of love-making or religious frenzy. Barrick had never seen such an expression of rapture on a human face.
“As long as I am held here, I will do what I am told,” the dead-eyed thing said. “I will burn this world to its foundations if you so direct me. I will suck the life from every plant and bird, everything that walks and breathes.” And saying this it laughed, a noise of such melodious horror that the Fireflower voices inside Barrick were shocked into silence again.
This god is insane, he realized. It has been locked away from the world too long. Like a dreamer who never wakes, it no longer knows the difference between what is outside itself and what is inside.
And now it had been loosed on the world, its only keeper the madman in golden armor. The autarch had begun to laugh, too, a loud and excited sound that was nearly a shriek of triumph. “Yes! Yes! Mine mine mine!” It was hard to say which of the two sounded less human.
“Make me immortal,” the autarch commanded when he had regained control of himself. In the new silence that blanketed the great cavern his voice carried far. “Make me immortal like you!”
“I will not,” said the god that wore the face of Barrick’s father.
“What?” Sulepis straightened and turned toward the motionless figure. The autarch was taller than the being that had been Olin, but for all his size and the flare of his armor and feathered ornaments, there was no way anyone could have thought the autarch the more powerful. The god burned inside of Olin, glowing so that from different angles the king’s very veins and bones could be seen. The skull beneath the king’s face might have been made from the same gleaming stone that dotted the great cavern’s walls. “Do what I say, or I will destroy you!”
Barrick was still held fast. Some of his strength had returned, but not enough: he was bleeding from many wounds, and bones were broken inside the sheath of his flesh.
“But you cannot destroy me, Sulepis am-Bishakh,” the god said in a reasonable tone. “You and these other mortals have not the power. You cannot compel me.”